THE STORY
OF DUTCH PAINTING

MAN WITH A FUR CAP REMBRANDT

THE MUSEUM OF THE HERMITAGE, ST. PETERSBURG

THE STORY OF
DUTCH PAINTING

BY
CHARLES H. CAFFIN
AUTHOR OF
“HOW TO STUDY PICTURES,” ETC.

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1911

Copyright, 1909, by
The Century Co.
——
Published November, 1909
THE DE VINNE PRESS

TO THE PRESENT AND FUTURE ART
OF THE NEW REPUBLIC OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THIS STORY OF THE ART OF THE OLD DUTCH REPUBLIC
IS DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR
New York, November, 1909

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE STORY
OF DUTCH PAINTING

CHAPTER I
THE END OF THE OLD

ON the 25th of October, 1555, Charles V abdicated the imperial crown, ceding Spain and the Netherlands to his favorite son, Philip II. The event proved to be the prologue of a drama, which in its immediate aspects involved the decay of Spain and the growth of Holland, but in its wider significance was to be the beginning of a new era.

For the modern world dates from the seventeenth century, and its pioneers were the Hollanders of that period. Practically everything that we recognize to-day as characteristic of the modern spirit in politics, religion, science, society, industry, commerce, and art has its prototype amid that sturdy people; being either the cause or the product of their struggle for independence and their self-development. Nor, in paying honor to the Dutch, need we attempt to suggest that they were the inventors of these characteristics. Most of the latter were, so to say, in the air. In the progress of things they had been evolved. But our debt to the Hollanders is that they attracted them and gave them practical application, and thus set the world upon a definite path of new progress. It is particularly with the newness of their art that we are here concerned, but we will try to study it in its relation to the material and mental environment of the nation itself, of whose newness it was so immediate a product and so manifest an expression.

For it is in this way that the art of every country may be studied with most interest and profit. Although there will appear from time to time certain individual artists, whose genius cannot be satisfactorily correlated to its environment, but will indeed, as in the case of Rembrandt’s, seem to be actually contradictory to it, yet even they can be more fully comprehended through the very contrast that they offer to the mass of their contemporaries, whose relation to their environment is readily discernible. Apropos of this customary connection between the artist and the spirit of his time, may be quoted that phrase of Richard Wagner’s, that all great art is produced in response to a common and collective need on the part of the community. It may serve as an excellent touchstone for testing the quality of this new Dutch art which we are to study, so let us for a moment examine its face value, leaving the fuller application of its meaning to all the subsequent pages of this book.

In Wagner’s mind great art, as he conceived it, stood out in clear contrast against a background of less art, of art which is produced in response to some more restricted impulse than that of a common and collective need of the people; for example, in catering to the whims of fashion. Such was the major part of the art of France produced in the last days before the Revolution. The great mass of the people were too abased by ill rule and exactions to have any consciousness but that of hunger, any common collective need but to fill their bellies. The only articulate demand to reach the artists was from the ephemeral swarm of courtiers, sycophants, and, as we should say to-day, “grafters,” who buzzed in splendor and profligacy at court. For a moment the glamour of this life inspired a great artist, Watteau, who, however, it is to be noted, was a foreigner. What he himself was he owed to Flanders. To him the glamour of the French court was but a pageant, a spectacle passing before his eyes, leaving his heart and conscience untouched. When, however, artists of French birth, reared in the home environment, followed in his steps, they revealed nothing of Watteau’s idealistic detachment from the grossness of the theme, but became purveyors to the shallow profligacy of their patrons. And to this day Van Loo, Boucher, and Fragonard have no place with other old masters in the hearts of the people; they are still the favorites of fashion. Nor was it until the upheaval of the Revolution had precipitated the gathering consciousness of a common and collective need on the part of the people, that French art in the nineteenth century began to develop a vital response. Moreover, what was characteristic of French art during the eighteenth century was generally symptomatic of the art of the whole of Europe. The latter had little or no creative force, was essentially an art of more or less feeble and perfunctory imitation. For the age itself was non-creative; a period of exhaustion after the strenuousness of the seventeenth century, or of the slow forming of new alinements after the shattering of the old ones; of speculation and doubts rather than of convictions.

So the artists, feeling no spur in the needs of the moment, fell to imitating the Renaissance artists of Italy. Among them, if we may anticipate the end of our present story, were the Dutch. They, too, had exhausted the immediate impulse of their own environment. War had made them a world-power, and peace brought them the foreign entanglements that maintenance of such a position entailed. They were no longer under the compulsion of an immense centripetal energy, a nation concentrated upon its own self-reliance. They began to spread themselves as cosmopolitans, aping the fashions of the rest of the world; and, as the fashion of the period was to be Italianate, so the artists of Holland, lacking at home the momentum of a common and collective need, ceased to be a school of great original painters, and became instead clumsy imitators of the splendors and elevation of the Italian masters of the Renaissance.

After this glance at the nature and cause of decline of Dutch art in the eighteenth century, we may return with a better appreciation of what is ahead of us in our study—the establishment in Holland in the seventeenth century of a new art, the product of a new nation; of a group of original and distinguished painters who formed, as Fromentin says, “the last of the great schools, perhaps the most original, certainly the most local.”

The course of our story, therefore, spreads before us. It is to discover in what respect the Dutch School of the seventeenth century was great, how it was original, and in what way its genius grew out of and responded to the common and collective need of the Dutch people of the period. Meanwhile there are the previous fifty years of the sixteenth century to be accounted for, which brings us back to the prologue of the drama, the abdication of Charles V.

That monarch, born in Ghent and educated in Flanders, had a special feeling of regard for his “dear Netherlanders.” Incidentally, they were the richest jewel in the imperial crown, and he had drawn from them annually two fifths of the enormous revenue that he squandered in wars of ambition elsewhere. He had, moreover, proved his love for them by systematic slaughtering of dissenters, that the remnant might be preserved within the fold of the Catholic Church. It was Brussels, therefore, that he selected as the scene of his abdication. Formerly the capital of the Dukes of Burgundy, it had been under imperial rule the seat of government of the vice-regents of the Netherlands; a city of royal and princely palaces, immediately surrounded by parks and game-forests, and fields and gardens, teeming with opulence; the royal center of a group of cities. Of these Antwerp was the commercial chief, the greatest emporium of trade in Europe, with an exchange in which five thousand merchants daily congregated, and a port where five hundred vessels daily made their entrance or departure. It was the distributing-point for the imports from the East and for the products of the Netherlands: textiles of most sumptuous fabrics as well as of plain cloths and linens, works of gold and silver craftsmanship, agricultural and dairy produce from the rich polders of the northern provinces, and fish from a hundred thriving towns and villages along the coast.

So when the emperor, enfeebled by excesses of action and appetite, felt his grip of power slackening, and determined to transfer this people of three million souls, the most industrious, versatile, and liberty-loving in the world, from his own pocket to that of his son, he saw to it that the proceeding should be conducted with a pageantry of ceremonial worthy of the occasion.

It was enacted in the hall of the renowned Order of the Knights of the Golden Fleece, the walls of which were hung with superb tapestries from the looms of Arras, representing the Biblical story of Gideon. The floor was occupied by official representatives of the provinces, clad in the sumptuous bravery of costume that distinguished this country and the times. Upon the dais at one end, beneath a splendid canopy, three chairs awaited the principals in the drama. Precisely at the stroke of three, the emperor entered from the adjoining chapel. Strange whim of Fate, he supported his gout-ridden body by leaning on the arm of the man who was eventually to be chief in undoing the policy that this day inaugurated—William, Count of Orange. Behind the emperor came Philip, and the regent, Queen Mary of Hungary, the “Christian widow” admired by Erasmus, who on one occasion had written to her brother, the emperor, that “in her opinion all heretics, whether repentant or not, should be prosecuted with such severity as that error might be at once extinguished, care being only taken that the provinces were not entirely depopulated.” Following the principals, appeared the Knights of the Fleece in full regalia, and a retinue of nobles, many of them, Egmont, Brederode, Berlaymont, Aerschot, and others, destined to figure in the subsequent drama of the Netherlands.

After a long oration by a member of the Privy Council, depicting the bodily infirmities of the emperor, his great zeal for his people’s welfare, and the particulars of the cession he was about to make, Charles himself read a long recapitulation of his wars and triumphs, dwelt upon his failing strength, and commended his successor to the good will and allegiance of his “dear Netherlanders.” At the conclusion of the speech the whole audience was melted to tears and the emperor himself wept like a child. Philip knelt in reverence, as his father made the sign of the cross above his head and blessed him in the name of the Holy Trinity. Then, while the assembled host applauded he rose to his feet, ruler by the grace of God, vice the emperor, of the Netherlands, Spain, and her American possessions. But he could not speak the language of the Netherlands; his acceptance of their allegiance and his own promises of regard for their interests had to be made through an interpreter.

Philip, as he assumed possession of the lives of millions, is characterized by Motley[A] as “a small meager man, much below middle height, with thin legs, a narrow chest, and the shrinking, timid air of an habitual invalid. In face, he was the living image of his father, having the same broad forehead and blue eye, with the same aquiline, but better-proportioned, nose. He had the same heavy hanging lip, with a vast mouth and monstrously protruding lower jaw. His complexion was fair, his hair light and thin, his beard yellow, short, and pointed. He had the aspect of a Fleming, but the loftiness of a Spaniard. His demeanor in public was still, silent, almost sepulchral. He looked habitually on the ground when he conversed, was chary of speech, embarrassed and even suffering in manner. This was ascribed partly to a natural haughtiness which he had occasionally endeavored to overcome, and partly to habitual pains in the stomach, occasioned by his inordinate fondness for pastry. Such,” adds Motley, “was the personal appearance of the man who was to receive into his single hand the destinies of half the world; whose single will was, for the future, to shape the fortunes of every individual then present, of many more in Europe, America, and at the ends of the earth, and of countless millions yet unborn.”

Yet it may be doubted whether in the assembly present on that memorable occasion there was a single person who even dimly perceived the enormity of this idea. That a nation, without being consulted, should be transferred like a herd of cattle from one owner to another, for his own use and emolument and even to be slaughtered at his will, probably seemed a natural and right proceeding. The fact emphasizes the immense and profound change that during the ensuing fifty years was to take possession of men’s imagination. The seventeenth century was to see a new idea of the rights of nations and of the relations that should govern a people and its rulers; the commencement, in fact, of a new era of thought in its bearing on life. But as yet the minds of all engaged in the ceremony were possessed with the old thought, the brute survival of Roman imperialism and of the medieval conflict of rival autocrats; the claim of a pope to exercise supreme sway over the consciences of innumerable millions, and the contention of temporal potentates for absolute control over the souls and bodies of their subjects. Thought and life had been, and still were, based upon the supremacy of the favored individual.

Let us note the effect which this idea had had upon the art of painting, that we may better appreciate the change which is to come over the latter, as the new idea begins to penetrate life and thought. How did painting, notably the fullest expression of it in Italian art, respond to the common and collective need of men’s lives and thoughts? In what way did it embody the idea of the propriety and desirableness of the subordination of all to the will of one individual?

In the first place, the idea was fostered by the Church. This is no place to attempt to discuss, on the one hand, how far the Church in upholding this doctrine was actuated by the desire of saving souls or, on the other hand, to what degree it benefited the world. It is sufficient to recall what an immense hold the Church had over the lives and thoughts of men, and that to establish and maintain it she employed painting as a handmaiden. Thus, in response to the common and collective need of the people, the favored subjects of painting were the doctrines and story of the Christian faith. The interiors of churches were converted into vast picture-books for the edification of the people, as well as into sumptuous shrines for the celebration of the mystic drama of the Mass. And, corresponding to the stately ceremonial of the latter, its superb accompaniments of lights and vestments, and its imposing spectacle of ordered ritual, the altarpieces grew to be miracles of stately composition; arrangements of form and color, light and shade, built up with an artifice as imposing and moving in its effects as that which had elaborated the Mass itself. So closely is the genius of these paintings a product of the Catholic Church’s particular mode of emphasizing its faith that it is evident, when men shall separate themselves from such exposition of the faith, their common and collective need will not demand pictures of this character. This will be exemplified in the case of the Dutch. They will need religious pictures, but neither of a ceremonial character, nor, in view of their idea of worshiping in spirit and in temples not made with hands, for the purposes of decorating their houses of God. Their religious pictures will be of a kind to affect the thoughts and lives of the people in a simpler and more unpretentious way, perhaps more intimately and personally.

But, while the splendor and dignity of the Italian religious pictures were inspired by the religious fervor that had continued from medieval times, they also reflected the new impulse which had made possible the Renaissance: the New Learning, the study of the classics, particularly of Hellenic culture, preëminently of Plato. From the latter, scholars and artists alike had learned to think in terms of the abstract. To the artists had been revealed the abstract idea of beauty—of beauty as at once the symbol and the expression of the highest good in life and thought. They were no longer satisfied simply to represent the sacred story and doctrines; they would have their pictures beautiful, independently of the subject; they would give the subject itself a higher significance through the abstract beauty of the compositions in which it was embodied. Hence the principles of technical distinction that began to sublimate their pictures, until they reached a degree of abstract as well as material elevation that has never been, and, one imagines, will never be surpassed. For it was the offspring of two motives that may never again be found in wedlock—the religious need and the need of expressing the enthusiasm for the cult of the classics. The former may still be operative, but the latter has been dissipated in the spread of the democratic idea.

And what was the principle upon which was based the classic ideal of abstract beauty, as it expressed itself in Italian painting? It was the supreme motive of the human form, as being, in its harmony of proportions and its rhythm of movement, the symbol and expression of abstract beauty. Again it happened that the teaching of the Church conjoined with the speculations of scholars. This world was thought to be the center of the universe; man was the axis of the world. Even God was interpreted as concerned chiefly in the rewarding or punishment of man, while to man all other created things were subordinate. To the imagination of the Renaissance, as of the Middle Ages, man towered up supreme against the mere background of the universe. Small wonder if some men, seizing the logic of this, aspired to be the owners of the bodies and souls of their fellows, and scarcely less that the others acquiesced! It was a rôle not only for popes, emperors, and kings to play upon the stage of the world, but for every princeling and duke to strut through on some smaller platform of a municipality. It justified the Medici in their own eyes, and made them almost of necessity the patrons of artists who had accepted the supremacy of such as they for the leading motive of their art. The painters, in fact, accepting the exclusive aristocracy of the human figure, adopting as their prime motive its ideal perfection, and building up compositions in which the figures were arranged in conformity with the rhythms and proportions derived from such ideal perfection, necessarily achieved an art that was essentially aristocratic, fitted for the temples of an aristocratic church and the palaces of the lay aristocracy. Yet, to repeat, it was also inspired by a great religious need, so that it was fitted for the masses as well as for their rulers.

Such was the great art of the world at the period when Charles V abdicated. Yet even by 1555 the tide has begun to ebb. Of all the great Florentines Michelangelo alone remains, and he has ceased from painting and sculpture. The giant brood survives only in the persons of Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Tintoretto. The last named will live out nearly the remainder of the century, after which the art of Italy will be in the hands of “mannerists” and “eclectics,” groups whose very names suggest that they are but fanning a flame already dead. Only the “naturalists” will have something in them of the modern spirit.

Meanwhile among the painters of the Netherlands there is as yet little or nothing of the distinction that will grow between Hollander and Flemish. The principal seat of painting is Antwerp, and its school has already been Italianized. Even Lucas van Leyden, the personal friend of Dürer, and at first an original genius inclined toward Gothic feeling, had before his death in 1533 gone over to Italian influence. Admirably representative of this influence is the large triptych by Barend van Orley, now in the Antwerp Museum. Its central panel shows The Day of Judgment. In the vault of the sky Christ appears, enthroned upon a rainbow, his feet resting on a globe. He is encircled by clouds, below which a ring of angels supports a cross, while to the right and left are seraphs sounding their trumps, and all the distant air is aquiver with angelic forms. Hovering midway between earth and sky is St. Michael, the archangel. Down on the earth are the myriads of the risen: the good on one side, in orderly bands, lifting hands and heads toward heaven, and on the other the lost souls in a tumult of flames and smoke. In the side panels the works of mercy are represented; grave personages ministering to the sick and the halt and the blind and the dying, in a spot dignified by monumental architecture, above which, seated on clouds, are ranged the Madonna and the saints. The superb composition, unquestionably suggested by that of the Disputá, is one which Raphael himself need not have been ashamed to design. But the figures that appear large in the foreground exhibit a realism of nudity and an individuality of separate characterization that bespeak the artist’s Flemish origin. Notwithstanding his Italian training he had still retained his racial instincts for naturalism. But this fine work was finished in 1525, and the artist died in 1542.

At the date we have selected as our starting-point, the leading artists were Jan van Scovel, Antonio Moro, and Pieter Pourbus; the last of Flemish birth, the others born in the northern provinces. Though Pourbus essayed religious subjects, the finest examples of which are in Bruges, he is best known as a portrait-painter, in which branch Moro also excelled. The latter, after studying under Scovel, visited Italy, and upon his return was recommended to Charles V, who despatched him to Madrid and Portugal, and later to England to make a portrait of Queen Mary, the wife of Philip II. Subsequently he was in the latter’s service in Spain, but returned to Brussels, where he found a patron in the Duke of Alva. His portraits are distinguished by evidence of truth to life as well as by their masterly, if somewhat careful, handling. But it was Scovel himself whose life best illustrated the tendencies of the time.

Born in Alkmaar in 1495, he studied in Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Utrecht; then in Cologne, Speyer, Strasburg, Carinthia, and Venice, from which last he went to Jerusalem. Returning to Europe, he lived for a while in Rome, where he was appointed superintendent of the Vatican Gallery by his countryman, Pope Adrian IV. On the latter’s death he returned to the Netherlands, living by turns in Utrecht and Haarlem, in one of which cities he died in 1562. Greatly influenced by his sojourn in Rome, he was the first of the strictly Dutch painters to absorb the Italian influence. Among several examples of his style in the Municipal Museum of Haarlem the most remarkable is a portrait group of twelve Knights Templars, with palm branches in their hands, indicating that they have made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It is noteworthy both for its characterization and as an early instance of what was to be a special feature of Dutch art—the portrait group. His subject pictures, mostly on religious themes, have the elegant, non-committal character of work that was inspired by outside impulse, though possibly in the landscape backgrounds one may find a foretaste of the Dutch regard for truth of natural surroundings. His work, indeed, like his life, exemplifies the lack of originality and conviction in the temper of the times. It was a period of suspense, succeeding to the vigorous realities of old ideals, scarcely ready for the development of the new. It was a prologue to a new era.

The new art, when it arrives, will be in response to a new common and collective need of a people, the product, in fact, of a new attitude of thought toward life. In place of the aristocratic it will be democratic, concerned with the rights of all instead of the privileges of the few. It will no longer set man in a pose of artificial supremacy against the background of the universe, but will begin to take account of his environment and to discover his true relation to it. It will be an era, not of magnificent mendacity and superb hypotheses, but of patient inquiry into the facts of life and of resolute adjustment of life to the facts. It will, indeed, be the dawning of the scientific era. And so firmly will it have taken hold of the thought and life of the then separated provinces of the north, that, even as they have parted absolutely from the old religion and politics, still adhered to by the southern states, so they will be impervious to the influence of the art by which the latter continue to be represented. When, fifty years from our opening date, Rubens shall return from Italy to give a brief lease of lustier life to the Italian motive by the vigor of his Flemish genius, the Hollanders of the seventeenth century will be absolutely unaffected by his influence. Their art will be as closed to the invasion of his masterful genius as their country is to the inroads of the German Ocean. Theirs will be an art not only new and original, but certainly most local.

CHAPTER II
THE OLD ORDER CHANGES

THE forty-five years, following the abdication of Charles V, yielded no indication of the harvest of painting that was to signalize the succeeding century. The earlier half of the period embraces the work of Pieter Aertz, first of the distinctively Dutch genre painters, and the latter half sees the growth to manhood of the portrait-painters Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt and Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn, while the whole period covers the active life of Jan de Bray. He, like the other two, was an honest but entirely uninspired portrait-painter; and it was not until nearly the end of the century that three men were born who were subsequently to become notable. These are Frans Hals, Jan van Goyen, and another landscape-painter, less well known, Hercules Seghers.

It was a period, indeed, solely of upheaval and preparation, during which the ground was plowed, harrowed, and fertilized, while its old landmarks were being removed, new boundaries established, and a new proprietorship asserted and exercised. It covered, moreover, the whole of Philip the Second’s miserable reign.

This monarch, tiring of the atmosphere of the Netherlands, soon withdrew to Spain, whence for the remainder of his life he attempted to govern the distant provinces as a satrapy, through vice-regents, military commanders, and bishops. His aim, as became his father’s son, was autocracy over the lives, fortunes, and consciences of his subjects. But, to do him justice, it was their own good, as he saw it, that he labored and intrigued for: to purge them of heresy and retain them within the fold of the Roman communion. For nothing is to be gained in the way of understanding the temper and conditions of that day by regarding Philip as an inhuman monster. Judged by the manner of our own time, he may seem to have been; but, judged by the tenacity and unscrupulousness with which men still cling to what they believe to be their rightful privileges and pursue what they are convinced is the dictate of their conscience, he is seen to be but a natural product of the mental and social conditions of his day. He was a recognizable and for a time even tolerated part of a system that men as yet had not thought of disturbing.

It was so, at first, that the citizens of the Netherlands, even William, Prince of Orange, regarded him. They held his overlordship sacred, even while they opposed the acts of his official representatives. They expected to be roundly taxed, but at the same time to have the machinery of their local government of free cities and Estates-General unimpeded; and it was against the interference with this on the part of Philip’s mercenaries that they first remonstrated. For, in the pursuance of his policy of riveting Roman Catholicism upon the Netherlands, Philip had induced the Pope to create more bishops and archbishops, to uphold whose hands in the extirpating of heresy four thousand Spanish troops were to

COUPLE DRINKING JAN STEEN

RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM

be retained in the country at the expense of the Estates. The latter and the cities remonstrated, and the troops were withdrawn, though the Inquisition continued its fell work. So matters drifted until 1566, a memorable year in the story of the rise and growth of Holland.

The Flemish nobles, though Roman Catholic to a man, drew up a “Compromise” and pledged themselves to resist the Inquisition. William of Orange, also a Catholic, though he had married a Protestant princess, Anna of Saxony, and would later change his profession of faith, instituted a secret system of espionage in Madrid over the acts and counsels of Philip. Then the League of Nobles, Orange assisting in the wording of the document, presented a “Request” to the vice-regent, praying that the edicts against heresy and the Inquisition might be withdrawn and the management of affairs restored to the Estates-General. Its presentation drew from one of the vice-regent’s counselors, Berlaymont, the expression: “Is it possible that your Highness can be afraid of these beggars?”

Three days later the dissentient nobles were entertained at a feast by Brederode. When the enthusiasm was at its height, and the guests were debating on a name and a watchword, the host let drop among them Berlaymont’s contemptuous phrase. At the same moment he produced a beggar’s wallet and bowl; and, slinging the one over his shoulder and filling the other with wine, called upon all present to drink to the Beggars. The word was caught up, and from man to man the wallet and bowl were passed round, until all had enrolled themselves in the Beggars’ ranks. Then, at the height of the excitement, the counts Orange, Horn, and Egmont entered the room. They were compelled to drink to the pledge and, although they immediately retired, were henceforth marked for Philip’s special revenge.

Later in the same year the “Image-breaking” occurred in Antwerp. It was unpremeditated and in its occurrence unguided: the spontaneous explosion of latent passions smoldering in the mob; the spark that kindled it, the annual procession and parade of the image of the Virgin. Scoffs and ribaldry were succeeded by horse-play, which involved a rough-and-tumble fight among some of the mob that filled the cathedral. The excitement grew. The mob, surging in and out of the building, began to mock an old woman who sold images of the Virgin at the cathedral door. She retaliated in kind, and from the bandying of words the mob and their victim proceeded to the hurling of missiles. A riot was averted for the moment by the arrival of the margrave and senators; but, when evening came, the cathedral was still occupied by a mob, now bent on mischief. The image of the Virgin was the first object of its fury, which, however, soon spread to a wholesale wrecking and desecration. The sacred vessels, the glory of stained glass, and the intricate beauty of carved work—every object of beauty that had made this one of the richest shrines of religious art in Christendom—were irretrievably destroyed. The blind, unreasoning fury, thus aroused, spread to other cities. Philip retaliated with another fury, coldly and calculatingly horrible. Alva was despatched with ten thousand troops, and the so-called Spanish Fury was inaugurated.

Its first victims were the counts Horn and Egmont, William of Orange escaping into exile. A Council of Troubles, or, as the Netherlanders called it, of Blood, was established, and in the six years of Alva’s stay eighteen thousand six hundred persons were put to death. These were irrespective of those who fell in armed resistance. For in 1572 the Beggars of the sea took Brill, and a little later drove the Spanish garrison out of Flushing. It was the signal for revolt. Nearly all the cities of Holland and Zeeland declared for William of Orange, and, in an assembly of the Estates at Dort, voted funds for a war, directed, however, even then, not against the sovereignty of Philip, but to the expulsion of his soldiery. The fortunes of the patriots were checkered with more defeats than victories, but meanwhile the Spanish operations were impeded by lack of money; the troops depending upon the pillage of an impoverished country and the occasional sack of a city, while the treasure-ships of Spain were being intercepted and her commerce continually harassed by the Beggars of the sea. So Philip sparred for breath, and through his vice-regent agreed to the withdrawal of his troops, a treaty to this effect being signed at Brussels in 1577.

William, however, was too convinced of the duplicity of Philip to be a party to the treaty, and persuaded the northern provinces to refuse their assent. The struggle was continued, punctuated by the Union of Utrecht, in which the Estates agreed upon a Dutch republic; by Philip’s rejoinder in the shape of a ban declared against the life of Orange, with a price of twenty-five thousand golden crowns upon his head; and by the counter-movement of the patriots. This was the declaration of Dutch independence, formally issued at The Hague on the 26th of July, 1581.

To ideas that had been slowly but steadily accumulating under the pressure of dire facts a formulation had at last been discovered and a name given. A new word had been uttered in the world, that was, as the centuries advanced, to be echoed and reëchoed and to be fruitful in newly advancing ideas. Comparable only to it, in modern history, was the word spoken sixty years before by Luther at the Diet of Worms. And now the doctrine of the responsibility to itself of the conscience, with its allied doctrine of religious freedom, had been completed by the political doctrine of the responsibility of government to the governed, and its allied doctrine of a nation’s right to the choice of its own form of government. But, just as the idea must be in labor until the word for it is delivered, so the word itself is but a battle-cry, the fruits of which are painfully and slowly won. The labor of Holland’s actual independence, begun fifteen years before, had yet to be protracted sixty-seven years.

Hitherto all the hope of the patriots had centered in William of Orange. In declaring their independence, they offered him the crown. Partly to prove the disinterestedness of his motives, still more perhaps because he believed that the final release from Spain could be effected only by putting the new state under the protection of France or England, he refused the dignity. Fortunately, however, France continued to be a reed on which no dependence could be placed, and the English help, when it did come, was indirect. Meanwhile, Philip’s ban was still out against the Stadtholder, and an attempt was made upon his life. He was shot in the face, but recovered from the wound, to fall a victim, however, two years later, to the pistol of one Balthasar Gerard. The tragedy occurred on July 10, 1584.

It had removed the chief obstacle to Philip’s success. Maurice would worthily succeed his father in the generalship of the war; but the brain and conscience, the unswerving patience and unselfishness, that had given some reality of union to the rival elements of the United Provinces, were buried with William the Silent. The exaggerated individualism of the several provinces and cities would have put them at the mercy of Philip, had he not himself been distracted from any singleness of purpose by the same cause. His own exaggerated egoism, inflated with the ambition to be a world-power, prevented him from concentrating his efforts upon the subjugation of the republic. He still strove to force his influence upon the affairs of France, and meanwhile made preparations to subdue England.

Thus Elizabeth, much as her Tudor instinct may have shrunk from the idea of encouraging rebellion against kingship, was induced by her advisers to make common cause with the Dutch against Spain. She refused their offer of the crown, but lent them money and some troops under the command of Leicester. He proved inefficient as a general, and, while a few names, such as that of Sir Philip Sidney, stand out heroically, England’s real contribution to Dutch independence was indirect. It was Drake’s incessant harrying of Spanish ships and ports and the destruction of the two Armadas that distracted Spain, broke her power of offense, and hastened the exhaustion of her waning resources. Thus the struggle with the provinces continued on land, but became more desultory, while of the sea the Dutch had practically undisputed mastery. The result was an accession of adventurous spirit that, while it failed in the attempt to discover a Northwest Passage, established settlements in the East Indies, wore down the competition of the Spaniards in the trade of those regions, and inaugurated a condition of extraordinary commercial prosperity.

Meanwhile Philip’s long reign of forty-three years was drawing to a close. In May, 1598, he handed over the Netherlands to his daughter and son-in-law, the Archduke Albert, and a few weeks later died. It is sufficient for our present purpose to recall that the prolongation of the war on behalf of the archduke by various generals, including Spinola, was stopped by the bankruptcy of the attacking parties. A truce of twelve years was agreed to in 1609.

Such was the background of events that preceded the birth of a new art in Holland. A new nation had been formed, and the circumstances which attended its formation had a direct influence in shaping the character of the new art. That it involved a departure from the decorative grandeur and the religious motive of Italian art was an incident of the Dutch having repudiated alike the Roman Catholic form of worship and the ceremonies of a regal court. Almost equally incidental was the fact that the artists were limited to subjects drawn from the personages and conditions of life within their own borders; were influenced, in fact, to become realists. This, I repeat, was incidental and not unexampled, for realism was at the same time revived in Italy and continued in Spain. The fundamental thing was to be the character of Holland’s realism; and this was a direct product of the national events we have been describing. For it was a symptom of the general character that the people had been forming in itself during more than half a century of nation-building. It was essentially a moral character.

I need hardly say that I do not use the word “moral” in its narrower sense, but to the full extent of its suggestion of a stout fiber of conviction and purpose that habitually promotes integrity of conscience and determines the conduct of a nation or an individual. It is nearer to our borrowed word, “morale.” It is the product, I take it, primarily of a great and worthy pride in self, and then of loyalty to the best in one’s self that such pride engenders and makes necessary. It is what an artist, least of all men, can afford to be without; for his work is necessarily an expression of himself, and, if he has not morality in the sense we have been describing, his work will inevitably betray the fact and prove the weaker for it. No artist in any medium can maintain a bluff. Even if it hoodwinks his contemporaries, posterity will “call it.”

Now, in the case of Holland, the struggle for a great principle, persevered in against all discouragements, had gradually established in the nation just such a morality, which during the years of the truce and for some thirty years later was to demonstrate its value in practically every department of human activity. To higher learning and research, to the practical affairs of life, such as manufactures, commerce, banking, engineering, agriculture, and dairy-farming, to questions of disease and hygiene, and to the systematizing of the legal relations as well of nations as of individuals, the Dutch brought the application of a new principle, substituting for empiricism and laissez-faire the method of approach and treatment that we now call scientific.

It is a term, by the way, that from time to time has been assumed to be antagonistic to morality; whereas, if properly considered, it should and does surely represent a morality of the most exacting and, frequently, the most disinterested kind. One after another, then, the Dutch in those days of newly realized nationality confronted the problems of intellectual, material, and social progress, bringing to their study a keen analysis, and handling their solution with integrity and thoroughness. With morality such as this conspicuously abroad in the community, it would have been strange if her artists had not reproduced it in their own special field; if to directness and sanity of vision they had not brought a scrupulous artistic conscience, that resulted in integrity and thoroughness of craftsmanship. That certain of them at some period of their careers deviated, as we shall see, from this high standard does but emphasize the existence of the latter, which, too, was reached, not by a few individuals, but by the artists as a body; so that in no other school of painting can you find such wide-spread excellence of technique. This, indeed, if we may anticipate the sequel, proved to be one of the causes of the school’s subsequent decline. Technique came to be pursued as a

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST GERARD TERBORCH

HAGUE MUSEUM

motive. But this was itself a symptom of a deeper cause—the freshness of the original motive had been outworn, its vigor slackened. The nation itself had by that time lost the simple directness of its early ideal and become enamoured of the sophistries of a world-wide ambition.

But to resume the thread of the story. At the commencement of the new century Hals was sixteen years old; Daniel Seghers, eleven; Van Goyen and the portrait-painter Thomas de Keyser, four. The train, in fact, was already laid for a new kind of portraiture and for a new motive in painting—that of naturalistic landscape. Otherwise the men destined to be the most representative of the new school were as yet unborn. With the opening of the century, however, their names appear thick and fast, and continue to arrive for forty years; after which the list of those conspicuous in the annals of the Dutch seventeenth-century school ceases. Dating, therefore, from Hals’s birth in 1584, the period covered is fifty-six years.

It is perhaps convenient for the purpose of assisting the memory to divide the first forty years of the new century into two parts: the first ending in 1621, with the conclusion of the twelve years’ truce; and the second with the marriage, in 1641, of the Prince of Orange’s son, William, to the eldest daughter of Charles I of England. The historical aspect of these two periods in relation to the story of art may be considered after we have reviewed the names of the principal artists whose births they contain.

The earlier division, then, includes the greatest name in the art of Holland, one of the greatest in all art, that of Rembrandt, who was born in 1606. The latter is the birth-year also of the flower-painter Jan van Heem, while the preceding years of the century disclose the names of the marine-painter Simon de Vlieger and the landscape-painters Salomon Ruisdael and Aert van der Neer, and Palamedesz, painter of genre. The year 1610 gives us Van Ostade and the landscape-painter Johannes Both; 1611, Ferdinand Bol and Willem van de Velde the Elder; 1613, Wouwerman and Gerard Dou; and 1615, Govert Flinck and Jan Wynants.

Here we may check the routine of enumeration to note another great name, one of the most distinguished of the Holland School. It is that of Gerard Terborch, born in 1617. He is followed, in 1619, by the landscape-painter Philips Koninck and the portrait-painter Bartholomeus van der Helst. To them succeed in 1620 Aelbert Cuyp and Nicolaes Berchem, followed in 1621 by Eeckhout and Allart van Everdingen.

This enumeration does not pretend to be exhaustive. The aim has been rather to include as few names as possible, so as to simplify the study by concentrating attention from the start on those which are most representative and most often met with. After familiarizing one’s self with these, it is comparatively easy to add to their number and to place the newly acquired ones in their chronological relation to this preliminary list. The same motive determines the selection for the second period.

It begins in 1624 with Carel Fabritius; but the following year discloses a name that in the Holland School stands very close to Rembrandt, Jacob Ruisdael, and another name of great reputation, Paul Potter. To 1626 belongs Jan Steen. After the birth of this artist there is a pause of four years, when Gabriel Metsu and the still-life painter Kalf appear, to be followed two years later, in 1632, by a notable trio, Nicolaes Maes, Pieter de Hooch, and the most distinguished, Jan Vermeer of Delft. With 1633 comes the marine-painter Willem van de Velde the Younger, and with 1635 Frans van Mieris; while 1636 yields Adriaen van de Velde, landscape-and figure-painter, and the painter of birds and poultry, Melchior d’Hondecoeter. Finally, the painter of architecture, Jan van der Heyden, is born in 1637; Hobbema in 1638, and in 1640 the painter of animals and dead game, Jan Weenix.

If one glances back over the names of these two periods, it is to note some interesting suggestions. In the first place, one of the earliest names, Van Heem, and the last of the list, Weenix, represent painters of still-life. The fact emphasizes the hold which this branch of painting had upon the interest alike of the painters and their public, and the part it plays in the general work of the school. In our own day there is perhaps a tendency to underestimate the interest of still-life. “Only a picture of flowers or fruit or game,” represents the feeling of many people on the subject. It is an attitude of mind, resulting from the habit of relying on the mind to appreciate a picture. Thus, as a subject for mental study, a bunch of flowers, a mass of vegetables, pots and pans and the like, may not be interesting. On the other hand, I think it would be a mistake to assume that the Holland public of the seventeenth century were free from this tendency; or to suppose that they regarded a picture as a thing to be viewed and to be appreciated solely through the abstract pleasure that is communicated by the joy of sight. As a matter of fact, they were actually interested in the objects represented in the still-life pictures. They were enthusiastic cultivators of flowers and vegetables, keen sportsmen, and shared with the women of their families a pride in all the objects of decoration and utility in their homes, so that even utensils of ordinary use were made and kept in a state of being ornamental. Accordingly, with that simple directness, characteristic of the race, they took a positive interest in the representation of such things. The latter were subjects of importance in life; accordingly, since their art was so intimate an expression of their life, they were welcomed as subjects for pictures.

The public also applauded the skill with which such subjects were rendered by the artists, and the latter, since still-life presented excellent opportunities for the display of craftsmanship, were glad enough to reciprocate the popular taste. Thus resulted what one notes as a second point in the consideration of Holland still-life painting: namely, that the artists freely introduced objects of still-life into their portraits. I cannot cite a more typical instance than the earliest military group-picture by Frans Hals in the Haarlem Museum. Here the viands and furnishings of the banquet are rendered with at least as much gusto as the heads, and for the present with more assurance. Thirdly, it is easy to trace the influence that this joy in the representation of still-life had upon the evolution of genre painting in the Holland School and upon the particular character that it assumes. In fact, the interest in still-life subjects, with the influence it had upon the methods of the artists, was a most important factor in the development of the Holland School. Closely allied to it is the interest in portraiture.

How radically this interest affected the art of Holland may be gathered from another glance at the foregoing list of names. It is in the beginning of the new era, in the earlier division of names, that all the famous portrait-painters appear. Not to mention Rembrandt, whose genius was of the universal kind, embracing in its single scope the separated motives of other artists, we find the names of Hals, Mierevelt, Ravesteyn, Van der Helst, Terborch, De Keyser, Cuyp, Bol, and Flinck. On the other hand, among the names in the second list, selected without any parti pris, there is not one of first or even second rank as a portrait-painter; only men like Maes and Netscher, who were primarily and far more worthily genre painters.

For it is the genre painters who form one of the chief distinctions of the later generation. It is true that Dou belongs with the earlier, and he was and still remains popular. But he is not in the same class as Vermeer and Steen, nor as Maes, Metsu, and De Hooch, scarcely as a painter even to be reckoned with Ostade. Indeed, he is nearer to Van Mieris and Netscher, the men in whose hands genre sank to a distinctly lower level. The only example in the earlier generation of a great genre painter is Terborch, who presents the exception, and a brilliant one, to the generalization I have suggested.

Another point of interest to be derived from this summary is the place that landscape takes among the motives of the Holland School. We see, in fact, that it figures at the beginning of the new era and continues to the end. Seghers and Van Goyen precede the century, which immediately opens with Salomon Ruisdael and Aert van der Neer, followed in the earlier division by Both, Wouwerman, Koninck, Cuyp, Berchem, and Van Everdingen. Then the second period opens with the birth of Jacob Ruisdael, and, including Potter, Adriaen van de Velde, and Vermeer (the last named with one known example), ends with Hobbema. Similarly, in the allied department of marine-painting, the century opens with Simon de Vlieger; Willem van de Velde the Elder follows, and in the later period the art is represented by Bakhuysen and Willem van de Velde the Younger.

As a matter of fact, in each field of motive the seed was laid in the beginning of the period under examination. What followed was a rotation of crops and an enriched development of each variety.

CHAPTER III
BEGINNING OF THE NEW

THE breathing-time given by the truce allowed play for dissensions among parties and for the ambitions that had crept into the house of Orange. Meanwhile it favored the development that during the next hundred years made Holland the richest and most advanced country in Europe.

To commemorate the raising of the siege of Leyden, the patriots in 1574 had founded a university in that city; to inaugurate the truce, they pumped dry the Beemster Lake and added eighteen thousand acres to their territory. The two acts, and even the order in which they came, were characteristic of this extraordinary people. They were the most enlightened of their day and brought their intelligence to bear upon all the practical concerns of life. The renown of their university excelled that of Paris, Oxford, or Cambridge; their scholars laid the foundations of international law and modern medicine, and their printing-presses produced more books than those of the rest of Europe combined. Their development in painting is our present subject, but they also carried their love of the beautiful into the design and craftsmanship of the ornaments and utensils of the home, and into the laying out of gardens and the cultivation of flowers. Meanwhile their looms, manned by weavers who had fled from Flanders to avoid religious persecution, produced the finest fabrics in Europe; their workshops exported the best mathematical, astronomical, and nautical instruments; and their discovery of the art of cutting and polishing diamonds gave them a monopoly of this business. The Bank of Amsterdam was founded in the first year of the truce and soon became famous for the amount of its deposits and the volume of its transactions, while the city itself became the chief distributing center for the commerce of the Old and the New World.

Meanwhile in agriculture the Hollanders displayed a similar combination of scientific resourcefulness and indomitable energy. They discovered the value as fodder of certain “artificial” grasses and clovers, and experimented with these to the immense improvement of their cattle and dairy produce; and by the application of intensive methods to the cultivation of the land so increased its productivity, that it became capable of supporting three times the population which had before subsisted on it. Further, by promoting the cultivation of the potato and other root-vegetables they wrought a signal improvement in the public health, since the variety of diet, thus made possible in winter, stamped out the scurvy and leprosy which had been the scourge of Holland as of other countries. At the same time they developed their fisheries and introduced improved methods of drying and treating fish; enlarged their merchant marine, so that they became the chief carriers of the world; and pushed their commerce with the Indies, until they

LANDSCAPE WITH FENCE JACOB VAN RUISDAEL

IMPERIAL ACADEMY, VIENNA

possessed a practical monopoly of the most lucrative trade of those times, namely, that of spices.

Meanwhile, as a reverse to this story of national progress, were the religious and political dissensions that crept into the commonwealth. Protestantism, after presenting a solid front to Romanism, now found itself cleft by the sect-rivalries of Arminians and Gomarists; and these in time gave color and opportunity to the ambition of Maurice. No disinterested patriot like his father, William the Silent, the second Stadtholder intrigued for his personal aggrandizement, and stained his memory by the judicial murder of the old patriot-statesman Barneveldt. On the other hand, of better memory was his service to art. In 1611 he commissioned Ravesteyn to paint a series of portraits of officers. These and other pictures that he gathered adorned his palace, and, added to by his successor, the Stadtholder Frederick Henry, became the nucleus of the collection that, accumulating through various vicissitudes, now occupies the Mauritshuis, as the Royal Museum of The Hague.

The lack of cohesion, of which these dissensions were a symptom, and that had always been close to the surface of unity owing to the excessive individualism of the cities, was reflected in the new art. Small as was the total area of the country, it supplied a number of artistic centers, each with its group of artists, who had sufficient in common to constitute a school. Under the influence of tradition, or more often of some conspicuous member of the group, they presented similarities of motive that distinguished their choice of subjects and even their method of painting. Thus we may note a school of Haarlem, of Leyden, of Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft, Dordrecht, and Utrecht. There was a certain rivalry between the schools of these various cities, but, on the other hand, a centripetal force that tended also to draw them together. Communication was easy in so small a country, and, moreover, the growing importance of Amsterdam as the commercial capital made it gradually a center also of art. The result was a happy combination of homogeneousness and individualism. The paintings of the period possess a common excellence, of a kind so distinctive that you may recognize at once a picture as belonging to the School of Holland, and yet they reveal so many individual traits that the homogeneousness is not characterized by monotony.

Accordingly, if we do not make the mistake of trying to surround the school of each city with an arbitrary wall, separating it conclusively from other cities, we may get many suggestions that help to classify our comprehension of the Holland School as a whole. I propose, therefore, to distribute the artists, whose names we have already reviewed, according to their individual schools; to the cities in which they worked, and, in most cases, were born and educated.

Under the head of Utrecht, then, we find the names of Heem, Hondecoeter, and Weenix, all three of them still-life painters. But, while this points to the fact that the distinguishing characteristic of the Utrecht School was the painting of flowers, dead game, and birds, it is not to be assumed that still-life is unrepresented in the other schools. The catalogues contain the names of no less than a hundred painters in this department, distributed throughout the various cities, and, as time goes on, congregating especially in Amsterdam. To the latter Weenix and Hondecoeter migrated; and it is interesting to note how the change of locale affected their art. Corresponding to the wealth of the capital, their pictures became much larger, designed as superb decorations for the walls of sumptuous houses.

The School of Haarlem includes the following: the portrait-painters Bray, Hals, and Terborch, the last also a genre painter, like Ostade of this city; and the landscapists Salomon and Jacob Ruisdael, Wynants, Everdingen, Wouwerman, Esaias van de Velde, and Berchem. The array of names, in the first place, suggests the importance of Haarlem at this period, as a center of commerce, society, and art. We may remember that it was particularly given to “corporation” pictures, as its museum to this day proclaims in the works of Bray and Hals, while Terborch, commencing under the influence of this place, later on painted the equivalent of a corporation picture in his Peace of Münster, now in the National Gallery. Another clue to be derived from this grouping of names is that Hals, the acknowledged leader, exerted a direct influence on Terborch and Ostade; and through the latter upon Steen, who came over from Leyden to be Ostade’s student.

Further, we recognize that this school was as fertile in landscape as in portraiture. With the exception of Van Goyen of Leyden, the founders and chief exponents of the art were associated with Haarlem; even Hobbema of Amsterdam, through his having been a pupil of Jacob Ruisdael. The latter’s career, also, is made clearer by this classification. Haarlem was his birthplace and the scene of his personally inspired work. When, discouraged by lack of recognition, he moved to Amsterdam, it was the example of his fellow-townsmen that made him change his own style. For Everdingen, who had visited Sweden, was painting romantic scenes of waterfalls and rocks, and Ruisdael, observing how they found favor with the Amsterdammers, abandoned his study of the Holland landscape to invent similar subjects. Finally, we may connect Wouwerman with two of his townsmen. From Wynants he learned the landscape, and by Hals was influenced in his incomparable treatment of the accompanying groups of figures.

The School of Leyden boasts the great name of Rembrandt, who, however, moved finally to Amsterdam in 1631, when nearing his twenty-fifth year. After him the names that appear in the School of Leyden are: Dou, Steen, Metsu, Mieris, and Van Goyen; all of them, the last named only excepted, genre painters. Dou studied with Rembrandt, who was seven years his senior, during the last three years of the latter’s stay in Leyden. He himself became the teacher of Gabriel Metsu, who, however, was also influenced by Frans Hals, and also, after his move to Amsterdam, where he died, by Rembrandt. Dou was also the instructor of Frans van Mieris. Steen, on the other hand, the greatest of the Leyden group, escaped the influence of Dou, becoming, as we have seen, a pupil of Van Ostade at Haarlem, and later of Van Goyen, after the latter had moved to The Hague. Van Goyen, though born in Leyden, is associated also with the Haarlem School, for after he had had several masters, including Van Swanenburch, in Leyden, he served apprenticeship to the Haarlem painter Esaias van de Velde. Moreover, by the time that he had mastered his art, he settled in The Hague. Thus the characteristic of the School of Leyden remains its genre.

The names from our list that the School of Delft includes are those of Mierevelt, Fabritius, Van Aelst, Palamedesz, De Hooch, and, most distinguished of all, Vermeer. Mierevelt, as a portrait-painter, found better opportunities for his art at the seat of government, and became a member of the Guild of Painters of The Hague. Carel Fabritius was early attracted to Amsterdam by the fame of Rembrandt, and only returned to work in Delft during the last four years of his short life of thirty-four years. Van Aelst, also, the still-life painter, after oscillating between Delft and Florence, finally settled in Amsterdam. So did the portraitist and painter of fashionable genre, Palamedesz. He derived help at first from Mierevelt and was influenced by Hals, and in 1621 his name appears as a member of the guild in Delft, but he spent the latter part of his life in Amsterdam. This city also absorbed De Hooch, who, before he finally settled there, had been influenced by Rembrandt. In fact, his participation in the School of Delft was limited to the two years in which he was a fellow-member of the guild with Jan Vermeer. They were of the same age, but Vermeer was his senior in the guild by two years, and it is scarcely to be questioned that the influence of his refined feeling and exquisite craftsmanship must have affected De Hooch considerably. In contrast to the flux of change that characterized the lives of the other members of the Delft School is the consistency of Vermeer’s attachment to the city of his birth. We shall discuss his art later. Here it is enough to recall that his only teacher was Carel Fabritius; but that his art, as it developed, was individually his own, conspicuously unique, and so admirable that when one speaks of the Delft School it is to think almost exclusively of its greatest artist, Jan Vermeer of Delft.

In connection with The Hague it is more correct to speak of a group than of a school. Among the artists in our list the only one born actually in this city was Ravesteyn, although it is true that Schalcken’s native place was a village in the vicinity. But the same reason that made the former constant to the seat of government attracted thither other artists. The Hague was also a center of society and fashion. Mierevelt found there a market for his portraits, Van Goyen for his landscapes, and Netscher, Schalcken, and De Hooch for genre pictures. The last named spent some years there, but retired to Amsterdam. The rest continued working at The Hague until their deaths. Among them Van Goyen is easily the most distinguished. The rest are rather symptomatic of the atmosphere of their surroundings. The portraits by Mierevelt and Ravesteyn have the perfunctoriness of official and society products, eminently dignified and comme il faut, irresistibly uninteresting, while the genre of Netscher and Schalcken is petty and frivolous by comparison with that of the older and greater painters, and Netscher’s portraits are frequently insipid as to character and over-occupied with the niceties of millinery.

Of Dordrecht or Dort our list contains only one name, that of Aelbert Cuyp, whose versatile genius embraced portraiture, landscape and animal painting, genre, still-life, church interiors, and marines. We may add one other name, that of Hoogstraten, not, however, so much on account of his art as because he was the George Vasari of his day, the historian and story-monger of the painters of Holland in the seventeenth century.

It remains to summarize the School of Amsterdam. As may have been gathered from the foregoing, it was rather an aggregate of artists, drawn thither by two causes: the wealth of the commercial capital and the fame and influence of Rembrandt. The latter, as we have seen, moved finally from his native city, Leyden, to Amsterdam in 1631, when he was in his twenty-fifth year. Two years later he painted The Lesson in Anatomy, and pupils began to flock to him; among the most notable being Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, Eeckhout, Metsu, Nicolaes Maes, Fabritius, and De Hooch. On the other hand, among those whom the importance of the city attracted were several from the neighboring School of Haarlem; the portrait-painter Van der Helst, for example, and the landscape-painters Berchem, Jan Wynants, Everdingen, and Jacob Ruisdael; while from Utrecht came the still-life painters Hondecoeter and Weenix, and from Delft Van Aelst.

On the other hand, the native-born artists of Amsterdam included that early genre painter Pieter Aertz; the portrait-painter Thomas de Keyser; and the landscapists, Hercules Seghers, Philips Koninck, Adriaen van de Velde, Aert van der Neer, and Hobbema. But the distinctively local characteristic of the school, situated as it was in this great emporium of foreign commerce, is its group of marine-painters; among whom we may mention Simon de Vlieger, Bakhuysen, and the elder and the younger Willem van de Velde. Their pictures are particularly interesting for the faithful and spirited representation of shipping: fishing craft, coasting vessels, East-Indiamen in harbor, and men-of-war in action. The pictures of these last are the most important of the occasional indications to be found in Dutch painting that throughout this period of productivity in the arts of peace the country was involved in war. Not that the soldier is absent from pictures. On the contrary, he figures frequently, but usually in the intervals of fighting, while enjoying the pleasures of a furlough; though occasionally we come upon some positive hint of the prevailing disturbance, as in a scene of bivouac, or of peasants and soldiery fighting, or of soldiery attacking a traveling-coach or party of hunters. Generally, however, the subjects of the Holland pictures are rather suggestive of a profound tranquillity.

As a matter of fact, by the time that painting reached its maturity, Holland had ceased to be the battle-ground. She had become rather a focus point of intrigue, involved in distant complications with France, Germany, and England. There are in the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam two pictures which hint at this: The Fishers for Souls, by Adriaen van de Venne, and The Enraged Swan, by Jan Asselyn.

The former, painted in 1611 during the truce, represents a river dotted with boats, the occupants of which

LANDSCAPE WITH OAK JAN VAN GOYEN

RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM

are fishing for the men and women that swim around them, while the banks are crowded with spectators. On the left are serried ranks of Hollanders, closing round those in whom they have confidence, namely, the Princes of Orange, Maurice and Frederick Henry, James I of England, and the young King of France, Louis XIII. On the opposite bank a less orderly mass of people confronts them, headed by the Archduke Albert and the Duchess Isabella, to whom Philip had made over the sovereignty of the Netherlands. So far the allegory epitomizes the political situation in which the Hollanders found themselves. Meanwhile, the religious aspect of the situation is suggested in the circumstances of the fishing, which seems to refer both to the old struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism and also to the new one arising out of the dissension in the latter between the rival sects of the Gomarists and Arminians. The happy outcome of it all is prefigured in the rainbow that spans the scene.

To appreciate the allegory involved in The Enraged Swan it is necessary to summarize the events that followed the conclusion of the truce in 1621. Spain would have been glad to substitute for the truce a permanent peace, but held out for terms that were unacceptable to the Hollanders; and war in a desultory fashion was renewed. By this time the Thirty Years’ War had commenced, and the religious and political struggle, that hitherto had centered in Holland, was being continued in a distant and larger field. Maurice died in 1625 and was succeeded in the office of Stadtholder by Frederick Henry, an able soldier and wise and patriotic statesman, who set himself to consolidate the internal resources of the republic. The latter showed its recognition of his services by the fatal expedients of making the office of Stadtholder hereditary in the house of Orange and of agreeing to the marriage of Frederick’s son William with the eldest daughter of Charles I. The effects of this were, on the one hand, to create within the republic an Orange party that in time intrigued for absolutism of government, and, on the other, to embroil Holland in the struggle between the Stuarts and the Parliament of England, and later, upon the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II, to involve the republic both in diplomacy and in war with that utterly unprincipled person.

Meanwhile peace was finally concluded with Spain in 1648, by the Treaty of Westphalia, or, as the compact is also styled, the Peace of Münster, which was proclaimed on June 5, 1648, the day on which Egmont and Horn had been executed by Alva eighty years before. By this time Frederick had been succeeded in the Stadtholdership by his son William, who, with the assistance of the Orange party, was intriguing for absolute rule. Fortunately for the republic, his death occurred two years later, a few days before the birth of his son, who eventually became Stadtholder and subsequently William III of England. Meanwhile, during the prince’s minority, the government was in the hands of Johan de Witt, whose book “The Interest of Holland” is an able summary of the political and commercial conditions of the republic at the time. His patriotism had been whetted to a personal edge by the fact that he had been imprisoned illegally and arbitrarily by the late Stadtholder, and his opposition to the pretensions of the Orange party was in consequence unceasing throughout his official term, which lasted from 1650 to 1672. It is this that is commemorated in The Enraged Swan.

The picture represents a swan standing above its nest of eggs, in a fierce and threatening attitude, prepared to repel the attack of a dog. Above the latter is an inscription in Dutch, signifying “The Enemy of the State,” while one of the eggs is lettered “Holland,” and beneath the swan are the words “Grand Pensionary,” the title of the office of Johan de Witt. Since the artist, Jan Asselyn, died in 1652, it is possible that his picture originally had no allegorical intent, but that its owner, seeing its application to the political situation, caused the inscriptions to be added. However this may be, it remains a curious document of the internal dissensions that at this period rent the little republic, and ended with the murder of De Witt and his brother by an Orange mob in 1672.

Of the entanglements into which the union of the house of Orange with the Stuarts eventually led the country, it is enough here to recall that the enmity of Spain had been replaced by that of France. The ambition of Louis XIV threatened not only Holland but Europe; and it was against this that William III during his Stadtholdership, and later, when he also occupied the throne of England, directed the military resources of both countries and his own unrivaled genius as a diplomatist. The result was a war, interrupted temporarily by nominal treaties of peace, but actually protracted beyond the lifetime of William, until the power of France had been beaten down by Marlborough, and peace was secured by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Hobbema, the last of the great Dutch painters of the seventeenth century, had died six years before.

Peace removed the barriers that Holland had erected for her self-preservation. Her artists, like her traders, wandered afield. The old centripetal tendency, which compelled the artist to find initiative in his own surroundings at home and so bred a distinctly Holland school, was superseded by the tendency to look for motive outside. The painter found it in Italy; he and his art became Italianate. This is not to say that the Holland painters of the eighteenth century are without merit. The best undoubtedly have a charm of their own; but it is not of the kind that one has learned to recognize and respect in the earlier pictures, as being a characteristic product of a nation fighting to maintain the integrity and independence of its nationality. The charm is by comparison slender and superficial, the product, not of originality, but of imitation. For the art of Holland had ceased to be the expression of conviction, and no longer exemplified the morality that had given character to its motive and unimpeachable integrity to its technique.

CHAPTER IV
FRANS HALS

THE readiest way to study the art of Holland in the seventeenth century is under the separate heads of portraiture, landscape, marine, genre, and still-life. In this way one obtains a comprehensive survey of the development of each of these branches, and is not confused by the fact that many of the artists practised in more than one of them. But at the start it must be observed that these separate departments are inclosed in a common motive. As Fromentin says, the art of Holland was essentially an art of portraiture. It followed from the character of the people and the conditions under which they found themselves. They were a nation of burghers, practical in mind, direct in action, self-centered, and full of personal and local pride. What more likely, in fact more inevitable, than that they should need and their painters should supply an art which gave a complete, exact, and for the most part unembellished portrait of the country, its people, and their habits of life.

But while this common motive of portraiture, which distinguishes every branch of Holland painting, was in response to a common and collective need of the people, it was modified and shaped by the example of two leading personalities: Hals and Rembrandt. So determining was their influence that an analysis of their respective motives and methods is not only a necessary preliminary but the quickest way to a comprehension of the development of the whole school.

They had characteristics in common. One might almost represent the two men by concentric circles; Hals being the inner, Rembrandt the indefinitely larger one. Hals was an epitome of the genius of the Dutch race; Rembrandt was also this, but more—the expression of a genius peculiarly his own. Both manifested, Hals invariably, Rembrandt at times, the quality of direct seeing and doing that was a national characteristic; but at other times Rembrandt was possessed of a spirituality, if one may so call it, that was directly opposed to the prevailing practicalness. Let us study each for the purpose of discovering what was his own personal art and how it affected the art of others.

Hals, then, the leader of the Haarlem School, we will examine first, not only because he was the oldest of the famous men of the seventeenth century, but also because his own genius was so closely representative of that of his countrymen. Of his life there is little to record. He was born in Antwerp, in 1584, but of parents of good Haarlem stock, temporarily driven from home by the vicissitudes of the war. He may have begun his studies in Antwerp, but by 1608 was probably settled in Haarlem. It must have been about two years later that he married a lady named Anneke Hermanszoon, for their child, Harmen Hals, was baptized on the 2d of September, 1611. The marriage appears to have been unfortunate, a record, dated 1616, showing that the husband was summoned and reprimanded by the magistrates for drunkenness and violent conduct toward his wife. She died a few days later, apparently from natural causes, and the following year Hals married Lysbeth Reyniers, with whom he lived for fifty years, bringing up a large family. That his conduct toward the first wife was not very seriously viewed by the community seems to be proved by the fact that in 1617 and 1618 he and his brother Dirck were elected members of the School of Rhetoric. Later they were elected to the Civic Guard and to the Painters’ Guild of St. Luke in Haarlem.

Like almost all the artists of his time, he was involved in pecuniary difficulties. In 1652 a baker sued him for the amount of two hundred guilders, a debt incurred for bread supplied and for small loans occasionally advanced. He obtained possession of the artist’s movables, but allowed him to continue in the use of them. Ten years later we find Hals, now seventy-eight years old, applying for relief from the city government, which granted him one hundred and fifty dollars in quarterly instalments. This exhausted, he renewed his application for public assistance, and was granted a yearly pension of two hundred guilders. Two years later, on or about the 26th of August, 1666, he died in his eighty-second year and was buried beneath the choir of the Church of St. Bavon in Haarlem.

These few circumstances represent practically all that is known of Frans Hals’s life as a man. The main suggestion to be derived from them is that he was held in considerable esteem by his fellow-townsmen. The painters enrolled him in their guild; his creditor did not unduly press him, and the municipality attended to the needs of his declining years. It is fit to dwell on these points, because a tradition, apparently started by Houbraken, the painter-historian of the artists of the period, has clung about the memory of Hals, representing him to have been a frequenter of pot-houses and generally dissolute. But, except for the reprimand administered to him in the affair of his first wife, there is nothing on record to prove the accuracy of this tradition. One is therefore permitted to believe that the incident was a single offense; sufficiently reprehensible, but not to be counted against his whole life. On the other hand, the leniency of the baker and the relief voted by the municipality may be fairly taken as arguments against the story of his worthlessness. But the most reliable evidence of its falsity is to be found in his work as an artist. It is inconceivable that the portraits and character studies which he executed in such numbers could have been produced by a man whose brain was fuddled with dissipation. The very character of his technique gives the lie to such a suspicion; for, as we shall see presently, it was the product of a particularly vigorous comprehension of facts, and was rendered in a method extraordinarily direct and sure, and often under circumstances of great rapidity. While his work is uneven in quality, it is only toward the end that there is a falling off in the certainty and the completeness of his technique. But the pathos that attaches to the two memorable examples of this decline, which now hang in the Haarlem Museum, the groups of male and female Regents of the Hospital for the Poor, is due to their revelation, not of any premature loss of power, but of the sapping of vitality which comes after fourscore years.

On the other hand, it would be fatal to a just appreciation of Hals to try to shape him to our modern notions of propriety. His character was certainly not staid; it may well have been, by present-day comparisons, unregulated. He was a man of his own time, and the character of his fellow-citizens may be seen in the groups he has left behind of the officers of the Civic Guard. They were men of vigorous personality, of strong passions; they lived high and, maybe, at times a bit recklessly. They had faced death in battle, and enjoyed the leisure which their own exertions had helped to bring about. That they enrolled Hals in their organization suggests that he was a man after their own heart. He must have been; otherwise he never could have painted them as he did, realizing at once their individualities of character and the general character of enthusiastic good-fellowship that united them. In none of these portraits is there any hint of excess, but in all the declaration of conviviality. It is quite reasonable to assume that this represents a truer portrait of the artist’s own personal character than the one suggested by Houbraken.

Moreover, there is another phase of his character that is positively revealed in his work. It is that of humor. Whether he is painting one of the curious and sometimes discreditable characters that haunted the streets and resorts of Haarlem, or the portrait of some burgomaster, fully alive to his own importance, or recording the puissance and the pageantry of the military guilds, it is always in a genial mood, not seldom with manifest humor. In fact, if ever there was an artist to whom, as revealed in his work, the epithet “jolly” were appropriate, it is Frans Hals.

And here we may note a shrewd observation by the German critic W. Bode. “The artist’s particular gift,” he says, “which we find in nearly every one of his portraits, consists in his establishing a lively connection between the person or persons represented and a supposed third person.” He does not represent the individual or group as if posing for himself, but as if he had surprised them in the presence of a third person, or as if he had in mind the impression that would be produced in a third person’s mind by the scene in front of him. His own point of view, in fact, is more than objective, more than a recognition of direct, visible facts; it is rather expansive, drawing into the circumference of its own observation the points of view and feeling of others than himself. One may almost say that he has the gift of revealing his personages not only as they appeared to him, but also as they were regarded by their contemporaries. Whether singly or in groups, they seem to be perfectly at home in an atmosphere at once sympathetic and conducive to the most spontaneous expression of their own natures. Thus, as Bode adds, “he has a great gift of rendering any passing moment of psychical agitation.”

Before proceeding to an analysis of his technique, we may note two other general characteristics: the vigor and the imagination that it involves. An artist’s technique is a measure of his personality, even though his

THE JOLLY TOPER FRANS HALS

RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM

motive be as impersonal as Hals’s. The latter’s point of view was objective, intent on seeing and rendering the facts of things as they confronted him; but, unlike many objective painters whose technique presents merely a correct and efficient record, because their own mind is little more than a mirror, reflecting mechanically what is in front of it, Hals’s mind was an active vitalizer of the impressions that it received. The distinction corresponds pretty completely to the difference which may exist between two lecturers. One will give a careful presentation of his subject which we listen to with interest, and, if we have confidence in his ability, with a willingness to accept his conclusions; but another will do more. Because of the gusto with which he attacks his subject, the genial, expansive outlook with which he views it, the broadly human spirit in which he treats it, even because of the tone of voice and gesture of body with which he lends color and warmth to his remarks, he will so stimulate his audience that they cease to be mere listeners. Their own brains are at work; they become active participators in the train of thought. It is in this kind of way that Hals’s technique affects one. It is the product of so ample and genial an outlook, so teems with gusto, and manifests itself with such an assurance of conviction and so vigorously facile a style, that it stimulates the imagination. In the presence of his portraits one is no passive spectator, but aroused to an activity of appreciation.

I have spoken of imagination; and I mean to imply a twofold exercise thereof: that Hals himself exhibited imagination and kindles it also in the spectator. To some people it may seem to be an abuse of the word to speak of imagination, in the case of an artist so content to be occupied with the objective traits of his subject as Hals was. But they overlook the fact that, while an artist may exercise no imagination in the choice of a subject, he may display a great deal in the rendering of it. He may not give reins to his imagination as Rembrandt did, peering below the surface of things, exploring the hidden recesses of the human soul; he may, on the contrary, be satisfied to be an able craftsman, handling the material presented to him, intent only on giving to it form and character; yet, even so, he will exhibit what one may call a technical imagination. And it is precisely this which characterizes the technique of Hals. It appears in the arrangement of his compositions, especially in the group-portraits, where it takes the form of a superior kind of inventiveness, which is but a phase of imagination. This gift abounds in the corporation pictures at Haarlem. The problem of disposing so many figures in such a way that each shall have its due share of individual emphasis, and yet that the whole group may have, on the one hand, a naturalness and spontaneity of suggestion, and, on the other, a reasonable amount of artistic unity, was one to try to its utmost capacity an artist’s inventiveness. Hals was the first to solve it; and, while other artists profited by his example, none could attain to the completeness of his success. You may be thinking of Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Cloth Guild; but the latter’s composition contains only six figures, whereas in Hals’s masterpiece, The Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew, there are fourteen. For a just comparison you should rather choose Van der Helst’s great composition in the Rijks Museum, The Banquet of the Civic Guard, an amazing example of inventiveness, but lacking in the suppleness, spontaneity, and gusto that Hals exhibits.

But the latter’s imagination is not alone displayed in the management of intricate compositions. It is displayed also in the treatment of each figure and in his pictures of single individuals; manifesting itself in two ways, both in the way he has seen his subject and in the way he has rendered it. And first for the imaginative quality of his vision. It is concerned with externals, or at least with traits of character that lie close to the surface; but with what an alertness it has observed the idiosyncrasy of each person, and how completely it has comprehended it! This is more than objective clear-sightedness; it implies a capacity to reconstruct the retinal impression, and to clothe it with actual living consciousness, that involves a marked exercise of the creative faculty of imagination. If you still doubt it, again compare Hals with Van der Helst, next to himself the most accomplished of the painters of corporation pictures, and the verdict concerning the latter’s work will surely be that by comparison it is prosy. At least that is the word that seems to me to express the difference, and it conveys the suggestion that the work is merely objective, unvitalized by the imaginative faculty.

Further, observe how Hals treats the costumes and the accompaniments of still-life in his pictures. He has not merely seen them; he has felt them, realized in his imagination their distinctive character and their relation to the whole impression. For those were brave days in Holland, succeeding the expiration of the truce; an underlying bravery of spirit and an external bravery of demeanor and manners characterized the life of the burghers. It was not for nothing that their trade had absorbed the finest weavers and artificers in the world; they decked themselves and their families in the costliest fabrics of their looms and loaded their tables with objects of fine plate. These things were more to them than vanities; they were the expression of the proud preëminence they had won. Now it is the spirit and the meaning of all this that Hals was so skilful in rendering. Van der Helst’s displays of costume rather suggest that “fine feathers make fine birds,” while the suggestion of Hals is of fine fellows appropriately bedecked with finery. His imagination, in fact, had caught the enthusiasm of the time and discovered its interpretation. And, further still, apart from the relation which this beauty of display bore to the temper of the times, it needs imagination in an artist to interpret the beauty of a fabric or an object of still-life. Mere imitation of its appearance is not sufficient. Such merely represents the appearance; it does not interpret it. The distinction will be clear to any one who is a student of photography and has seen the still-life studies of flowers and fruit and glassware by Baron A. de Meyer. In them the crude notion of merely representing appearances has been superseded by the desire to make the picture express the enthusiasm which their beauty has inspired. The result is an interpretation of the sentiment of beauty. Such, too, is Hals’s rendering of the silks and velvets and lawn ruffs, the dishes and

PORTRAIT OF NICOLAES VAN DER MEER FRANS HALS

BURGOMASTER OF HAARLEM

HAARLEM MUSEUM

goblets, the fruit and wine, banners and weapons. He has not only seen these things, he has felt their beauty; discovered, in fact, by an act of imagination, the sentiment of beauty they involve.

And here I may add, in the way of anticipation, that, if a person is dull to the sentiment of beauty that things inanimate may suggest, he is not going to proceed very far toward an appreciation of the art of Holland in the seventeenth century, for it was largely concerned with the beauty that is inherent in material things. If he is conscious of nothing more in the rendering of costumes and accessories with which these pictures abound than the cleverness of material representation, he will soon tire of the study, for the skilfulness is so frequently repeated, and its very repetition will fatigue. He may begin by exclaiming: “How wonderfully that sash, this velvet gown, or what not is painted!” but, unless he can go on and share the enthusiasm for beauty that inspired and assured the artist’s skill; if, in a word, his own imagination cannot conspire with the imagination of the artist, he will very shortly be an exceedingly tired student of Holland art.

So far we have discussed the imagination with which Hals observed his subjects; it remains to note how imagination was involved in the rendering of them. Really the two processes, the mental and the manual, are inextricably united, for it was the way he felt his subject that determined the impression he received of it, and the impression itself that suggested the mode of rendering it. Yes, he was an Impressionist. The term, as we know, is modern, dating from about 1871, but the idea involved in it has been derived from the example of Frans Hals and of his great contemporary Velasquez, with whom, however, so far as is known, he had no possible chance of conferring. These two original minds, separated by distance and the difference of race and by the barrier of hostilities that precluded any acquaintance with each other or each other’s work, were nevertheless kindred geniuses who simultaneously discovered a new way of seeing and rendering their subject. It did not survive their generation, for the artists of the next century turned again to Italy, and Hals and Velasquez were practically forgotten, until in the early sixties of the nineteenth century Edouard Manet rediscovered Velasquez, and the study of him led to the recognition of Hals, so that both became an example and inspiration to modern art. It produced, in fact, a revolution in the artist’s point of view and method of painting, and the principle involved was dubbed Impressionism.

Some confusion still exists as to what is implied by this term. Many, for example, having heard that Claude Monet is an Impressionist and observing that he covers his pictures with little dabs of paint, suppose that in this consists Impressionism. Others of wider observation, having found themselves puzzled and even outraged by the vagaries in paint that are committed under cover of Impressionism, have concluded that Impressionism is something which, in the words of the late Lord Dundreary, “No fellah can understand”; no layman, at least; and, according to their temperament, they either foam at the mouth with disgust of Impressionism or regard it as a comparatively harmless form of lunacy. In either case they miss the fact that Impressionism has become a vital principle of modern thought, expressing itself not only in the arts: in painting, sculpture, literature, play-writing, acting, music, and dancing, but also in modern methods of education, and, by a natural extension of the idea involved, even in the modern attitude toward matters of criminology and sanitation. These, however, are modern evolutions from the single, simple principle involved in the Impressionism of Hals and Velasquez. Before discussing this, let us note what is surely interesting and extremely suggestive, namely, that both the rudimentary principle, as it appears in Hals, and the efflorescence to which it attained in the nineteenth century were contemporary with a signal advance in the growth of the scientific spirit. It is, in fact, of the latter that Impressionism is a phase.

With Hals, as with modern Impressionists, it represents a more natural way of seeing. When the eye is directed toward an object, it sees the latter as a whole; it perceives some details and fails to perceive others; it automatically selects and eliminates. There is another way of seeing, as when the object is kept for a long time under observation, and the eye travels over it at leisure and exhaustively examines every part. Of a picture that records the results of this way of seeing, we exclaim, “How realistic!” And so in a sense it is; but, on the other hand, we know that it does not really represent the way in which we see things in every-day life. What our eye usually records is not an inventory of details, but a summarized impression of a personality; and the more vivid the impression, the less likely is it to be distracted by a number of details. We are impressed by the general significance of the personality, and note only those details that most contribute to it; the details that are themselves most significant and characteristic. Such was Hals’s way of seeing his subject; and, if it resulted in a very vivid impression in the case of an individual portrait, how much more when it embraced the complicated impression of a group! The latter, as a matter of fact, does include more than any eye could possibly embrace in a single act of vision; but this was a necessary concession to the difficulties of the problem, which was to effect a compromise between the conflicting claims, on the one hand, of the group as a whole, and, on the other, of each of the individual units composing it. Admitting the need of this reconciliation of opposites, we can scarcely hesitate to acknowledge the vividness of the total impression and the no less vivid impression of each one of its component units.

When we analyze the principle of this method of seeing, it is found to be that of relativity. In selecting this or rejecting that the artist has been guided by its more or less of value in relation to the whole. The composition, in fact, is an adjusted balance of varieties of values; an interlocked scheme of mutual relations; shrewdly calculated to assert the significance of the whole without undue impairment of the varying character of the parts. And this principle, thus applied to the whole composition, operates also in the treatment of every part. Whether it be the folds of a sash, the modeling of an arm in a sleeve, the substance and set of a ruff, or the construction of a face, each is attained by observing the relation of the values. In this case, however, one uses values, not to measure the amount of relative importance that they play in the general scheme, but in the technical sense of the amount and quality of light reflected from the several facets of the surface. Hals chose to view his subject in a diffused light that permitted practically no shadows, but reduced the whole to a tissue of more light and less light, of higher and lower values. While this sounds like the method of the modern plein-air painters, which has been evolved from the example of Hals and Velasquez, it is not quite the same; for Hals does not represent the light as being independent of the figures and enveloping them, but still adheres to the old convention of making the figure itself a center of light, as, for instance, a lamp is. Thus in one of his groups, where a window appears at the back, the light beyond it is of lower value than that which illumines the figures; and, in another case, a landscape presents a darker background. But, having adopted this convention, he adheres to the logic of it, and, like the modern painter who has followed his example, but with the difference that he tries to represent the effect of plein-air, models his forms in colored light by the juxtaposition of the various values.

And it is characteristic of Hals that in doing this he overlooks minute distinctions of value, seizing only the most salient ones and laying them on the canvas with a broad brush and a remarkable decision. Thus his technique presents a bold and vigorous generalization of the values; often conspicuous for what it omits, as when he indicates the back of a hat or a ruff by a flat tone that is almost uninterrupted by contrasting tones. It is a technique, in fact, that relies very largely on suggestion; hence its stimulating character, for one’s own imagination is invited to assist in the illusion.

Nor does this suggestive generalization involve the slovenliness or crudeness of brushwork that often disfigures the modern impressionistic picture. While a canvas by Hals should be viewed from some distance off, it does not offend at close range. On the contrary, one can enjoy the orderliness and finesse, the result of fluency and assurance, that the brushwork reveals, the ensemble having that quality of perfected craftsmanship which characterizes the whole Holland School. And, though Hals is scarcely to be classed as a colorist, the compositions being decked with color rather than interwoven of color, yet his color has a distinctly positive charm. For he takes so frank a delight in local colors, whether gravely or gaily sumptuous, preserves their purity of hue and invests them with luminousness. His color-schemes, too, have this distinction, that, for all their bravery of show, they are never commonplace and seldom without a clear suggestion of virility.

A unique opportunity of tracing the development of his style is presented by the series of corporation pictures at Haarlem. I will not attempt a detailed description of each, but rather recall the impressions that were jotted down in the presence of them. The earliest, then, is The Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George, dated 1616, when Hals was thirty-two. How magnificent the display of still-life, the table-cloth, fruit, dishes, and goblets painted with such skill and evident delight; what a vigorous enthusiasm is manifested in the treatment of the uniforms, mostly black, and the scarfs of white and crimson silk! Each head is strongly characterized, and so are the hands. The heads are so disposed that they form a band across the picture, below which another band contains the more sprinkled arrangement of the hands. Two of the latter, close together near the center of the table, form the nucleus from which the lines of the composition radiate. The composition, in fact, is quite formal, and the heads, one notices, are lighted from the side and constructed of shadow as well as light; meanwhile no light comes in from the window at the back, through which appears a landscape, less vividly lighted than the scene indoors. Indeed, the whole arrangement is still influenced by the arbitrary devices of the studio; nor does one fail to note that the space occupied by the heads is flattened almost into one plane, as a modern photographic group is apt to be.

These points are emphasized by a comparison with Nos. 117 and 118, painted eleven years later. The Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. George, this time, is presented in an interior without a window visible. The whole apartment seems to be filled with lighted air; the heads are no longer so obviously arranged to secure a contrast of dark against light and light against dark; they are evenly illuminated, and take their places justly in their several planes. For the planes here extend farther back, and the composition is more varied, with less suggestion of studied artfulness. Moreover, the treatment of the costumes has become finer, the blacks especially yielding a variety of delightful grays that give increased sparkle and animation to the color-scheme. The flesh parts also are more luminous, and reveal a greater fluency of brushwork, as if the artist had “got there” with more ease and rapidity. The effect of all this is very arresting and satisfying until one examines The Banquet of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew.

The latter belongs to the same year, 1627; but the artist has surpassed himself. Here the faces literally scintillate with animation of color. Those of the other picture are discovered by comparison to be less illuminated; after all, they have been modeled to some extent with shadow, and the flesh in parts is inclined to be greenish gray or drab. The hands also in the latter picture have more expression and a more individual characterization, while the gestures are more natural and spontaneous. The composition, too, is at once more varied and more coördinated. Again, as in both the previous pictures, the nucleus of it is a hand; in this case the center of two diagonal axes. But, while the design is geometrical, the naturalness of the grouping is quite extraordinary in its mingling of ease and propriety. Further, the color masses are more inventively arranged; their spotting is more effectively distributed, and the gaiety of the color is prolonged into the lower part of the composition. This picture commemorates the banquet given by the corps on the eve of its departure to the siege of Hasselt and Mons. Six years later Hals painted a Reunion of the same corps, though only one member appears in both scenes. It is Captain Johan Schatter, who in the earlier picture is seated in front of the table, facing left. He occupies the same position in the later group,

REUNION OF THE OFFICERS OF ST. ANDREW FRANS HALS

HAARLEM MUSEUM

but is now standing and looking over his shoulder toward the spectator. He has exchanged his costume of black and golden brown, with its scarf of rose and white, for a snuff-colored jerkin, pearl-gray under-coat, and a sky-blue sash and feather; and the difference is reflected in the superior delicacy of color that distinguishes the later picture.

In this Reunion of the Officers of the Archers of St. Andrew the corporation pictures reach their highest water-mark. The background, however, of brownish-olive foliage, showing through an opening some red roofs against the sky, is dry in color and lacking in luminosity. The heads, in consequence, do not present the same suggestion of being enveloped in light as those in the previous picture. In what, then, does the superiority of this acknowledged masterpiece consist? Comparing it with the earlier examples, we discover that its color-scheme of blue and amber, while less resplendent, is more choice, delicate, and subtle, and that the loveliness of color has been made contributory to the characterization of the figures. This is scarcely to be appreciated from the photographic reproduction, but in presence of the original one has a lively sense of it. There is no suggestion of the display of color having been considered by itself or as itself an end; the tonal harmony so accords with the harmony of expression that characterizes the separate individualities of the group that tone and expression are in complete unity. Again, as a result or, more probably, a cause of this harmony of expression, there is a complete simplicity of attitude and gesture. “What shall I do with my hands?” Any one who has stage-managed amateur theatricals knows how frequently this question is asked by the performers. In nine cases out of ten the best advice, though the hardest to follow, is to do nothing. It is just the fact that the members of this group are so admirably doing nothing which gives at once such a naturalness and so high a distinction to this picture.

Here, in fact, we touch perhaps the clue to the whole superiority of this canvas. In one word, it is control; that almost unconscious self-control on the artist’s part which results from his consciousness of assured capacity. He has won beyond the point of experiment, beyond the later temptation to indulge in display of knowledge and skill; he has so absolutely acquired both and attuned the one to the other, that the tricks and devices of his craft no longer sway his imagination; he shows, in fact, his mastery not so much by what he does as by what he withholds; he has reached in this great work a plane of extraordinary artistic conscientiousness. The picture, in fact, has that appearance of inevitableness, that suggestion of having grown rather than of having been made, which is the highest expression of genius. It represents Hals at his zenith. The date is 1633 and the artist’s age forty-nine.

The next picture, Officers of the Archers of St. George, is dated 1639, six years later. It is conspicuously inferior not only to the masterpiece (that were excusable), but to all the preceding works. It represents a falling off not so much in actual craftsmanship as in artistic morality. The artist appears to have been satisfied to do less well than he could; to do, in fact, as little as he might. He has saved himself expenditure of invention in the composition by stringing the figures out in a line across the front, and raising another line of figures behind them; this having been the niggard, unimaginative arrangement of the older corporation pictures, from which his other work had presented so happy a departure. Correspondingly the heads, while forcible in characterization, are lacking in luminosity, and the fabrics are without vivacity. The general effect is stockish; the breath of life and of art, as Hals could suggest both, is absent.

Nor in the next picture, dated two years later, the Regents of the Hospital of St. Elizabeth, do we detect the true Frans Hals. The faces are trickily modeled, brilliant high lights being contrasted with heavy greenish-drab shadows; and the figures are lumpish, except the second from the right, which alone reveals sympathy and enthusiasm.

Of the last two groups nothing need be said but that they are the work of a veteran of eighty years, whose hand has lost its cunning, while his brain, no longer active, retains only some wavering recollections of its original activity.

The important point to be suggested in conclusion is that Hals’s best period included the years from 1625 to 1635; that after the latter period this enthusiasm waned, and his work became too often perfunctory. In such cases the flesh parts exhibit an uninspired use of green lower tones that have a tendency to become drab; features are often crudely emphasized by a stroke or dab of exaggerated value, and luminosity has faded into a dull, sometimes lumpish inertness. Even so, however, compared with the work of other Hollanders, apart from Rembrandt, it still had a quality and a character that render it distinguished; but much of this distinction disappears when you compare him with himself, the later with the earlier Hals. Many of his portraits suggest the perfunctoriness of a man who has got his method down pat, and tediously repeats it. In a word, his technique was so personal and so dependent upon the mood of the moment that it needed the stimulus of enthusiasm, and when this was absent, the vitality of the technique became impaired.

CHAPTER V
REMBRANDT HARMENSZ VAN RIJN

IT is surely no accident that the name of Rembrandt is familiar to thousands who know little or nothing of his art. It has, in fact, become so embedded in the mental consciousness of modern times, that, even as it must have been a household word in his own day, so almost it has grown to be in ours. And for this there seem to be two reasons. In the very use of the word “household” there is a hint of one: the homely, in the sense of plain and simple, and very heartfelt appeal that his conception of the subject-matter generally makes to the imagination. But there is another reason and a greater. It is the magnitude of his personality as an artist. This was but dimly recognized in his own day, in the succeeding century forgotten, and is only beginning to be fully understood in our own times. The influence with which he fertilized art was to prove so great, that it needed a long period of gestation before it came to birth, and a correspondingly long period of development before it reached maturity. Now it has grown to be recognized and felt, until, like all the great contributions to human ideas, it is, so to say, in the air. Unwittingly as well as by conviction the world is conscious of it. Briefly, the nature of the influence is that it has revolutionized our attitude toward beauty. It has not eliminated the old idea of beauty, but supplemented it with a newer one, no less potent and far more adapted to our modern needs. The absolutism of the classic ideal has been overthrown by it. Art, that once was solely aristocratic, has been expanded to include the democratic ideal. It was therefore necessary for the world to have mastered the latter, as a principle of life and conduct, before it could be capable of appreciating Rembrandt to the full.

For Rembrandt’s art is the antithesis of Greek art. The Greek is founded upon a hypothesis, upon the assumption of a possible perfection; Rembrandt’s upon an acceptance of imperfection, upon the facts of life in relation to things as they exist. The one is based upon an artificially constructed absolutism, and is technically expressed through form—form, absolute and supreme. The other, in its recognition of the relativity of everything in life, is based upon tone, as affected by its environment of light. The difference is fundamental both in its technical and psychological aspect.

As long as society was conditioned by the aristocratic theory, Greek art, and the Renaissance interpretation of its principles, sufficed; but, with the growth and spread of the democratic, a new principle became necessary. Rembrandt conceived it, and our own age is learning to apply it. Our appreciation of the character of beauty has become enlarged by a realization of the beauty of character. The latter may be associated with beauty of form and features, though in real life it is more often not; yet, even when it is, we have discovered that the beauty of character is due, not to the form itself, but to the expression inherent in the form, and that character, as revealed by expression, is discernible also in things homely, even in the ugly. Art, in fact, has extended its province until it more nearly corresponds with the universal scheme of earthly conditions, wherein the good is mingled with the bad, and the sun shines alike on the just and the unjust. Meanwhile, even as humanity gropes toward some divine reconciliation of the coexistence of evil with good, so art must find some means of spiritualizing the facts of life and of idealizing the homely and ugly. This preëminently was Rembrandt’s gift.

The few known facts of Rembrandt’s life are clearly associated with his art. Born on the 15th of July, 1606, in Leyden, he was the son of Harmen of the Rhine, a miller in comfortable circumstances. He was sent to a Latin school as a preparation for entrance into the University of Leyden, that “when he became of age he might serve the city and the republic with his knowledge.” But he was destined to serve them in another way. Since he showed no taste for Latin and a single desire to be an artist, he was removed from school and placed with the local painter, Jacob van Swanenburch. He was then about twelve years old, and after spending three years with this teacher had made such progress that the father decided to send him to Amsterdam to study under Pieter Lastman, whose pictures of religious subjects had made him the most popular painter of that day.

With this master Rembrandt remained only six months. Lastman’s influence, however, had been considerable, though scarcely in a direct way. In fact, what he did for Rembrandt was to pass on to the latter the influence which he himself had derived from Elsheimer during a two years’ stay in Rome. For this German painter had made a great reputation by treating Biblical subjects in the natural or anti-classic manner. The scene was suggested by the Italian landscape, and the personages were real men and women, clothed in ordinary costume of the period. It is this translation of the Bible story into the vernacular of the day, corresponding as it did to the motive of Lucas van Leyden in his picture at Leyden of The Last Judgment, which must have been familiar to Rembrandt, that affected the latter’s imagination.

He returned to Leyden and for seven years in his father’s house continued a course of self-study. It was based on direct study from life, his models being himself and his relations, and included (where again one may trace the influence of Lucas van Leyden) the practice of etching. The earliest date recorded of any of these products of his needle is 1628, which appears on An Old Woman’s Head, Full Face, seen only to the Chin, and Bust of an Old Woman.[B] In 1624 appeared another dated etching, Rembrandt, a Bust, and the following year a series of small plates for which he himself was the model: Rembrandt with an Open Mouth; with an Air of Grimace; with Haggard Eyes, and Laughing.

These prints give a remarkable clue to a phase of Rembrandt’s personality that has not been sufficiently emphasized. They show that it included the instinct and faculty of an actor; the consciousness that in his body he possessed a muscular instrument capable of expressing the emotions of the mind; and, moreover, the capacity to play upon it. This throws a new light upon the habit, exhibited at intervals throughout his life, of making portraits of himself and frequently in costume. The latter particular is apt to be dismissed as a harmless pleasantry, whereas it should rather be considered extraordinarily suggestive. For he was not merely “dressing up,” but enacting a part in his own person; actually realizing in his body the idea that possessed his mind. That he could do this and needed to do it for the satisfaction of his own mental and physical impulses, helps to explain his extraordinary facility and power as a draftsman. For the virtue of great drawing consists in its quality of expression, in its ability to infuse feeling into a gesture or movement and so correlate the latter to the mood of mind, presumed to be dominating the subject. This virtue cannot be gained at second hand from a model; it must be inherent in the artist himself, and will be efficient according to the degree in which the artist can feel the emotion in himself and is capable of physically expressing it; in a word, to the degree in which he possesses the instinct of an actor. Viewed in this light Rembrandt’s habit of grimacing before a mirror, dressing up and posturing, gives a most illuminating clue to the source of his amazing versatility and capacity of expression as a draftsman.

In the same year, 1630, which produced the small prints, appeared also two “serious” etchings of himself; also two Biblical subjects, Jesus Disputing with the Doctors and The Presentation with the Angel; and, further, several fine portrait studies. In this year he moved to Amsterdam.

He was twenty-four years old, and, as far as etching is concerned, “was already in the peculiar situation,” I quote from Hamerton, “of an artist who has left himself no room for improvement except in attempting art of another kind, and in overcoming new, though possibly not greater, difficulties.” Among the oil-paintings that he had already executed are St. Paul (Stuttgart); St. Jerome in a Cave (Berlin); two portraits of old men (Cassel); and one of a young man, resembling himself, at The Hague. It was the fame of his portraits that, according to Orlers, brought invitations from Amsterdam to settle there; and during the first years of his sojourn over a shop on the Bloemgracht he executed six that are still in existence. But the most remarkable picture of this year is the St. Simeon in the Temple, now in the Gallery of The Hague. Here we detect for the first time the power and strangeness of Rembrandt’s imagination, displayed in the mysteriously lighted expanse of mammoth architecture and in lustrous fabrics, and, more essentially, the foretaste of his lifelong effort to construct a composition out of colored light.[C] It is the first revelation of his peculiarly individual self.

Meanwhile he had been attending the anatomy classes of the famous Dr. Tulp, and the following year, 1632, produced the Hague picture, The Lesson in Anatomy, as remarkable for clearly defined characterization as the St. Simeon had been for its imaginative treatment of light. Both have elements of indecision, for the artist was only twenty-six, but in them the qualities of Rembrandt’s personality are already established.

The Lesson brought him fame. Pupils flocked to his studio, clients sought his pictures, and the ten years that followed teemed with productivity and fortune. They cover his life with Saskia van Uylenborch, whom he married in 1634 and lost by death in 1642. She appears in frequent portraits and inspired many of his pictures. He occupied houses successively on the Nieuwe Doelstraat, Binnen-Amstel, and the Jodenbreedstraat, living simply, but indulging profusely in the collection of works of art. This heyday of prosperity in the companionship of Saskia is commemorated in the superb portrait of his wife sitting upon his knee, in the Dresden Gallery.

In 1642 his fortunes received a double blow. Saskia died, and his corporation picture, The Sortie of the Frans Banning Cock Company, popularly but erroneously called “The Night Watch,” was received with disfavor. It proved to be a turning-point in his career. Public recognition began to wane, and financial embarrassments to increase; yet his artistic fecundity continued, marked by more frequent examples of landscape. Toward the end of the forties he enjoyed the sympathetic support of the burgomaster, Jan Six, an enthusiastic lover of books and collector of works of art, whose friendship lasted till his death in 1658. Meanwhile, about 1653, Rembrandt seems to have married the woman who had devoted herself to his care, Hendrickje Stoffels. She died in 1656 and money troubles crowded upon him. He was declared a bankrupt; his household goods were seized by his creditors and later sold at an appalling sacrifice; the house in the Jodenbreedstraat also passed under the hammer, and Rembrandt retired to a house on the Rosengracht. This was in 1658. The house, which still exists, was a comfortable one; and it seems probable that the eleven years during which Rembrandt lived in it, until his death in 1669, were a time of tranquillity, as they certainly were of continued artistic activity. This period, indeed, produced The Six Syndics of the Cloth Hall (Amsterdam), a masterpiece of assured self-possession and complete achievement. It also was marked with many portraits of himself, no less than four having been painted in the last year of his life. One of them shows him blear eyed, with red and bulbous face, but laughing, and holding his maulstick like a scepter.[D]

Eugène Fromentin, skilled alike as a man of letters and a painter, analyzes in his “Maîtres d’Autrefois” the art of Rembrandt. The argument has been so generally accepted, that it must be described here. It may be compressed as follows: Fromentin discovers contradictions in the art of Rembrandt. It is at one time so realistic, and at another so visionary. He explains this apparent contradiction by the theory that Rembrandt’s was a dual nature. On the one side he shared with his fellow-artists their practicalness, direct seeing, and love of clear and definite expression; while on the other he was a solitary dreamer, a visionary, to whom the mystery of things made

THE SYNDICS OF THE CLOTH GUILD REMBRANDT

RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM

chief appeal. Thus, by turns he was realist and idealist; occasionally, as in The Sortie, his pictures seem to have been the battle-ground of his two irreconcilable natures.

Fromentin calls the realist in Rembrandt the “exterior man” as contrasted with the “interior man,” revealed in his examples of idealism. The former he characterizes as an accomplished technician, with certainty of hand and a keenly logical mind. “His aim is to be comprehensible and veracious; he emulates the true colors of the daylight; draws with a fidelity and thoroughness that, while it makes you forget that it is drawing, itself forgets nothing. It is excellently physiognomical. It expresses and characterizes, in their individuality, traits, glances, attitudes, and gestures, that is to say, normal habits of behavior and the furtive accidents of life. His execution has the propriety, the ampleness, the high bearing, the firm tissue, the force and conciseness that belong to passed masters in the art of fine idiomatic expression.” The original of this last phrase is l’art des beaux langues; and we may note, in passing, its significance in connection with the context. Indeed, the whole paragraph might as accurately characterize some fine literary production, such as would satisfy the high standard of the French Academy. It is based upon the clear comprehension and logic of form.

On the contrary, when Rembrandt is in the mood of idealism, Fromentin no longer discovers in him the consummate technician. He sacrifices form to chiaroscuro. And what of his use of chiaroscuro, so peculiar to himself that it has come to be called by his name? Fromentin, in a beautiful passage, first suggests the general value of chiaroscuro. Ordinarily used, it is the art of rendering the atmosphere visible and of painting an object enveloped in air. “But it is more than any other medium the form of intimate sensations or ideas. It is light, vaporous, veiled, discreet; it lends its charm to things which are concealed, invites curiosity, adds an attraction to moral beauties, and gives a grace to the speculation of conscience. In fine, it is concerned with sentiment, emotion, the uncertain, the undefined and infinite; with dreams and the ideal. And that is why it is appropriately the poetic and natural atmosphere, which the genius of Rembrandt did not cease to inhabit.”

It was natural, therefore, that Rembrandt should bring to perfection this method of chiaroscuro, which Fromentin describes as the art of “enveloping everything, of immersing everything, in a bath of shadow, of plunging into it even the light itself, in order to draw out the light therefrom so that it shall appear more distant, more radiant; to cause waves of shadow to revolve round lighted centers; and to modulate these shadows, to hollow them, make them dense and yet render the obscurity transparent, and the less obscure parts easy to penetrate; in a word, to give to the strongest colors a kind of permeability which stops them from being black.”

But it is Rembrandt’s peculiar characteristic that he carried the method of chiaroscuro much further. Fromentin thus sums the matter up: He calls him a luminarist, apologizing for the word, which, when he wrote in 1876, was still a “barbarous” one. And a luminarist he defines to be one who conceives of light as outside of

SORTIE OF THE BANNING COCK COMPANY REMBRANDT

RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM

fixed laws, attaches to it an extraordinary meaning, and makes great sacrifices for it. And, he adds, “if such is the meaning of this newly coined word, Rembrandt is at once defined and judged, for the word expresses an idea difficult to render, but a true idea, a rare eulogy and a criticism.”

Briefly, then, Fromentin’s argument is this: Rembrandt in his ideal moods essayed to use light as the actual material out of which to construct form; he composed in light. The result was admirable, when the character of the subject justified such treatment; but open to serious criticism when it did not. The famous instance of the latter, in Fromentin’s judgment, is The Sortie or “Night Watch.”

“Rembrandt had to represent a company of men-at-arms. It would have been easy enough to tell us what they were going to do; but he has told us so negligently, that people are still unable to comprehend it, even in Amsterdam. He had to paint some likenesses, they are doubtful; some characteristic costumes, they are for the most part apocryphal; a picturesque effect, and this effect is such that the picture becomes undecipherable. The subject, the personages and details have disappeared in the shadowy phantasmagoria of the palette. Ordinarily Rembrandt excels in rendering light, he is marvelous in the art of painting an imaginary subject (fiction); his habit is to think, his master faculty is the expression of light. But here imagination is out of place, life is wanting, and the thought atones for nothing. As for the light, it is unnatural, unquiet, and artificial; it radiates from the inside to the outside, it dissolves the objects that it illuminates. I see some focal spots of brilliance, but I see nothing illuminated; the light is neither beautiful, true, nor reasonable (motivée).”

Before discussing this judgment let us note Fromentin’s approval of Rembrandt’s use of light—in the case of subjects that seem to him to justify it. He instances particularly The Supper at Emmaus and The Good Samaritan, both in the Louvre. He speaks with fine sympathy of the original and infinitely human conception of Christ in the former picture, while upon the technique of the latter he comments as follows: “The canvas is enveloped in smoke (enfumée), all impregnated with somber golds, very rich in depth and, above all, very grave. The material is muddy, yet transparent; the brushwork heavy, yet subtle; hesitating and resolute; labored and free; very unequal, uncertain, vague in some parts, astonishingly precise in others. No contour appears, not an accent added in the way of routine. There is evident an extreme timidity, which is not the result of ignorance and proceeds, one would say, from the fear of being banal or from the price which the thinker attaches to the immediate and direct expression of life. The objects have a structure that seems to exist in itself, almost without the help of formulas, rendering, without any means that you can seize upon, the uncertainties of nature. There are some nude limbs and feet of irreproachable construction—moreover, ‘style.’ In the pale, pinched, groaning visage of the wounded man, there is nothing save expression, something that comes from the soul, from within outward; tonelessness (atonie), suffering; as it were, the sad joy of collecting one’s self when one feels about to die. Not a contortion, not a trait that overreaches moderation, not a touch in this rendering of the inexpressible that is not pathetic and restrained; everything dictated by profound emotion and interpreted by means altogether extraordinary.” And, adds Fromentin: “Examine other painters of sentiment, of physiognomy and characterization, the men of scrupulous observation or of verve. Take account of their intentions; study their scrutiny, measure their domain, weigh well their language, and ask yourself, if anywhere you perceive an equal intimacy in the expression of a visage, an emotion of this nature, such ingenuity in the manner of feeling; anything, in a word, which is as delicate to conceive, as delicate to say, and is said in terms more original, more exquisite, or more perfect.”

Nothing else, I suppose, has ever been written about this phase of Rembrandt’s art that is at once so fine in thought and diction, so enlightening, and so memorable. For one here meets in union the trained thinker and practised writer and the painter; thus getting much more than the painter’s exclusive point of view, and at the same time the latter, interpreted by the painter at first hand. The gist of it is that, when the subject involved an idea, Rembrandt was not only justified in sacrificing the corporeal to the incorporeal, but was master of a technique that could express the idea conclusively and with supreme emotional appeal.

In conclusion, Fromentin considers that the whole life of Rembrandt represents a struggle between the two sides of his nature. The earliest battle-ground was The Sortie, from which, owing to the nature of the problem, he came off worsted. But did he ever succeed in reconciling the “exterior” and the “interior” man? If ever, Fromentin concludes, surely in The Syndics, which, in a word, is a work of imagination and yet of real life.

The whole exposition of Fromentin’s argument, from which these fragments have been gathered, is worth careful study, particularly because of the constructive nature of the criticism. In its combination of technical information and logical point of view, in its subtlety and human sympathy, it affords a model for the method of approaching the serious examination of a great artist’s work. One may acknowledge its value and the benefit derived from it, without subscribing entirely to its conclusions. It may be possible to feel that it has the defect, if one is to find a single word for it, of excessive concentration. It centers too exclusively around one picture, The Sortie of the Banning Cock Company.

This picture has suffered from too much exploitation. It has been praised “not wisely but too well” by artists and has been worshiped by the public. Fromentin may have approached it with undue expectations; at any rate, he found himself disappointed; and, being at variance with the general judgment, felt the need of justifying his own attitude. He has done it so exhaustively as to warp his own judgment, until what there is of weakness in the picture has become almost an obsession with him. It is never absent from his thoughts, and continually peeps in on one page after another, and mingles with the judgment of other pictures. Fromentin has used it as a pivot around which to swing his whole appreciation of Rembrandt; and, more than this, has himself been sucked into the vortex of his own revolving argument. It is an expedient scarcely to be warranted by breadth of criticism to select one picture of any artist as a focusing-point for a consideration of his whole work, and least of all in the case of an artist so universal as Rembrandt.

Moreover, Fromentin does not persuade us that he had a very wide acquaintance with the master’s work. He knew his Louvre well; grew up with it, and had become habituated to it and fixed in the impressions he had derived. Later in life he made the acquaintance of the National Gallery and visited Dresden. Then he makes the pilgrimage to Holland. He first reaches The Hague, where The Lesson in Anatomy fails to satisfy his expectations. He is alive to its excellence in parts, but does not find the strength and character of two or three of the heads sustained throughout the canvas. He feels that an unreasonable amount of adulation has been lavished on the picture. It arouses his antagonism and piques in him the critical vein. Then an interval in his approach to Rembrandt ensues. He alights at Haarlem and notes with what definitive skill and clearness of comprehension Frans Hals treated the corporation subject. Fresh from these impressions, he finds himself in front of Rembrandt’s treatment of a corresponding theme. By contrast it seems to him a work of confused motives and manifold uncertainties. Yet how extravagantly it has been lauded! Like The Lesson in Anatomy, The Sortie of the Banning Cock Company has been prejudiced by uncritical applause. The critic in Fromentin is now thoroughly roused. With every wish to be fair to Rembrandt, he proceeds to build upon these two pictures a fabric of constructive and destructive criticism. His faculties are narrowed to a focus spot of concentrated heat, are swept into the ardor of their centripetal momentum, and become caught up in the subtleties of their own compressed invention. He elaborates a theory, and into its compact limits would squeeze the genius of Rembrandt.

Further, what kind of mind did Fromentin bring to bear upon this examination? A generous one, desirous of being broad; but a Frenchman’s and an Academician’s; one, that is to say, which clings to logic and bases its expression upon form. It exhibits and demands clarity of reasoning; declares itself in refined exactness. It knew of Impressionism, yet was too old in its convictions, too fixed in earlier traditions, to comprehend it. But, since the day when Fromentin’s mind was in the forming, the world’s point of view toward art, even one may say toward life, has changed; and its attitude toward the manner of expression has progressed, until it has come back to Rembrandt with a new and more intimate comprehension. It recognizes him as an Impressionist of sensations and tries to judge him by what we now know and feel about Impressionism.

Briefly, we have learned that there may be something in art more valuable than the record of a person, place, or incident, and this is, the impression of it conceived and rendered by the artist; that, through this interpretation, the place, person, or incident becomes illuminated, more vitally represented. How, for example, can Bartholdi’s

PORTRAIT OF ELIZABETH BAS REMBRANDT

RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM

Statue of Liberty compare with the interpretation of the idea evolved by such a man as Lincoln? The idea thus logically and formally shaped in the Statue will not even bear comparison with that which is expressed by the spontaneous utterance of some poor emigrant, as he finds his foot at last planted on the free soil of his imaginings. In life, as in art, the real thing to us is what we feel about it; in Rembrandt’s art, what he feels about his subject and makes us feel.

Then, again, we have discovered that often we are made to feel most deeply, not by detailed statement, but by suggestion: in the case of a speaker, perhaps by a momentary gesture, or play of features, by a sudden inflection of the voice, or a pause in speech, and the occasional accent of a word or sentence; in the case of a writer, often as much by what he leaves unsaid, by the thought that is veiled behind the statement, by the choice and emphasis of certain features of his record. Further, we may have learned to find occasional value even in uncertainty or indecision. We may sometimes tire of, and possibly distrust, the world’s tendency to “get things down fine.” The latter may seem to imply that the thing itself is small, or that there is smallness in the vision of the man who thus approaches life. We may be conscious of life itself as an aggregate of moments of brilliant realization and more frequent half-tones, enveloped in a sea of shadow; and may reach nearer to the heart and meaning of it by welcoming its mystery.

Surely something of this sort was Rembrandt’s attitude toward life, and therefore his point of view toward art. He has been called unlearned, because he had small taste for Latin and no scholastic acquisitions. But in the wisdom of life, as drawn from life itself and distilled through the brain and temperament of one who searched life deeply and lived his own life ardently, he has had few equals, at least among artists. For the explanation of Rembrandt is that to him life presented itself as an idea.

Thus he is without a rival in the sympathetic rendering of old age. He saw more than the exterior of it; he penetrated into its psychology. For—how shall I express it?—the fruit of living is experience, and experience tends more and more to lose sight of the concrete in the abstract, to replace the substance of the form with the higher reality of the idea. The young man, as he ceases to depend upon the ministrations of the mother, enshrines her in a personal idea of motherhood; the old lover rediscovers the bride of his youth in the idea with which time has enveloped the wife. The idea is the aureole or nimbus that gathers about the form and proclaims its sanctity. It is the idea, then, that Rembrandt, the artist of ideas, the searcher after the higher reality inherent in form, discovered in old age.

On the other hand, while Rembrandt exalted the idea above the substance, he was not indifferent to form. No great artist whose domain is the world of sight can be.

Indeed, the wider the acquaintance with the master goes, whether in the galleries throughout Europe, or through the examples which occasionally emerge from private collections, as in the recent extraordinary display in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the more one is impressed not only with Rembrandt’s feeling for form, but also with his amazing power of rendering it.

Sometimes, as in the marvelously detailed Portrait of Elizabeth Bas (Amsterdam), the impression he derived of the original was one which he could render only by enforcing the bulk and character and precision of form. This lady, though not of gentle birth, was, as the widow of Admiral Swartenhout, a figure in society. This much we know from the written record; the rest is recorded in the portrait. As Rembrandt saw her, she was a woman of determined personality; a narrow and rigid believer in her own importance, and a stickler for its recognition; an ingrained precisionist, as upright as her backbone and as set in formalism as her corseted figure. Yet the flesh of her face and hands has the dimpled softness and delicate contours of well-preserved old age. She is fully conscious of prerogatives, but her hardness has been made gracious by the kindly touch of time. All this, no doubt, was written in detail on her ample person, and Rembrandt, feeling the intimate value of its completeness, has detailed it in the portrait.

Or take another example of the record of an impression, The Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels in the Berlin Gallery. The devotion of this woman had stayed the artist in his trials, and her exuberant youth had put fresh force into his courage. He had learned to depend upon her watchful solicitude, to lean upon her abundant vitality, and to warm his imagination in the glow of her physical ardor. In the portrait he wraps her strong figure in the rich grandeur of a mantle that burns with wonderful brown lights above an under-robe of golden cream, while a flash of crimson glows in her brown hair, and a golden warmth is exhaled from the full, firm features and hovers above the ripe harvest of her bosom. The portrait is an artist’s apotheosis of the glory and the benediction of physical vitality; and, let us not forget, in the strength of this woman’s companionship Rembrandt achieved his masterpiece of austere and virile intellectuality—The Syndics of the Cloth Workers’ Guild.

And so we might take one by one the pictures of this master, and, whether the impression that it records is drawn mainly from the exterior of its subject or from a penetration of the character or soul within, whether it be the expression of the soul of some fact of Bible story, no matter what the degree of idealism involved, every time it is form or some interpretation thereof, that is the foundation of the picture. Not form, however, for its own sake, for the purpose of rendering it in its logical and reasoned completeness or of exploiting the master’s efficiency in doing what every student aspires, and many can learn, to do; but form so felt, so rendered, that what we are made conscious of is not alone the physical sense of form, but its abstract significance; in a word, if I may say so, the soul of form, as from time to time it is used to interpret some one or other of the artist’s impressions.

You cannot pass from one to the other of the thirty-seven examples of Rembrandt in the exhibition that, as I write, is being held in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, or travel round the galleries of Europe, intent upon the wealth of Rembrandts that they contain, without reaching a conviction, that grows more and more assured, of the profound knowledge and feeling for form

PORTRAIT OF HENDRICKJE STOFFELS REMBRANDT

BERLIN GALLERY

that Rembrandt possessed and communicates. He may reveal clearly but a portion of a figure, veiling or obscuring the rest; but what is revealed is sufficient for the physical appreciation of the whole figure, and enforces the physical significance, while the spiritual significance is profoundly increased by the demand that has been made upon our imagination. After long study one comes to believe, not only that Rembrandt treated form differently from other artists, which no one, I suppose, denies; but also that no other artist has ever treated it with such a mingling of power and subtlety, with so fine and sure a reliance upon its physical qualities, and yet with so marvelous a capacity to interpret its spiritual significance.

Almost similar in motive is Rembrandt’s use of color. He is not a colorist in the sense that the great Venetians were, for they extolled the glory of local color—the actual splendor of hue with which they clothed their radiant figures and wove about them a triumphant orchestration. This also is an abstract use of color, involving a consciousness and suggestion of the effect that color as color has upon the imagination. But Rembrandt went further. He, too, had the love of beautiful fabrics, bought them freely, and as freely used them on his models. But here he parts company with the Venetians; for by this time he has ceased to think of the fabric or its color as something of value in itself. It has become merged in the impression that he has formed of the whole subject. It may occupy a large or small part in the total impression; that is as it may be; but henceforth it is only contributory to the physical and spiritual sensations that he has received and is set upon interpreting. Thus he is at no pains to preserve the material integrity of the local color; he uses it as he does form: extracting from it this or that, here forcing or there veiling its emphasis, plunging much of it in shadow. Therefore, even as his treatment of form has proved an enigma to some critics, so some hesitate to call him a colorist. After the manner of the Venetians, I repeat, he is not. But need theirs be the only manner of the colorist?

Rembrandt used color as he used form, as a symbol of expression; and, to repeat, what he sought to express was the impression that the form and color had aroused in his imagination. When the impression was derived merely from the externals of form, he would elaborate in detail the retinal impression and in such cases usually preserve the integrity of the local color. But it was otherwise when the impression was extracted from the soul of the subject, whether the latter were an individual whose portrait he was painting, or a Biblical incident the significance of which he was elaborating out of his own inner consciousness of its meaning. For then he is not representing things as he sees them, but recreating the impression that they have made in his imagination. The local color becomes merged in the color of his imagination; gathers brilliance from its certainties, fades into the half-lights of its questionings, is threaded through and through with strands of discrimination, and plunged in the mystery of the unknowable.

Finally, in this use of form and color, Rembrandt is nearer to what is most modern in the art of to-day than has been generally recognized. For of late Impressionism has entered on a new development. During some time it was intent upon a more vivid and truthful representation of the facts of life. It sat at the feet of Velasquez, trying to do again what he did so supremely well. It did not succeed in equaling his authority, for the sufficient reason that an imitator never rivals the master; but at the same time it added something to what Velasquez stands for. Helped by science, it has carried further than he did the study of light in the variety and quality of its manifestations, and has gained, especially in landscape, an instrument for interpreting sentiment and moods of temperament. In the intellectual analysis of the appearance of nature Velasquez said the last word; and now in the domain of emotion and of spiritual expression, as interpreted by the representation of nature, there is nothing further to be said. In a word, the ideal of graphic art, as based upon the representation of nature, which since the thirteenth century has occupied the artists of the Western world, is now found to have reached a development beyond which no further development is possible. As a commentary upon this is the development of photography, which along the line of representation vies with painting.

Certain original minds,[E] therefore, have realized the need of a new ideal, a new motive with which to refertilize their art. They are seeking to discover it in a new conception of Impressionism. Their position, in effect, is this: Need the impression that is derived from nature be limited by the necessities of naturalistic representation? Can it not free itself from the liability of being judged by the standard of what it is derived from, and claim to be enjoyed for its own abstract qualities of form and color? May it not detach itself more freely from the concrete, and attain nearer to the abstract? Are there not further possibilities in the conception of form and color as symbols?

The new movement, for such it has grown to be, in France, Germany, Austria, and England, has come by way of the East. The harvest of a century of Eastern exploration, ripened during the last fifty years by an increasing intimacy with the art of Egypt, China, Korea, Japan, India, and Mesopotamia, is at length being stored. We are beginning to realize the Oriental conception of art as decoration, relying upon the abstract qualities of form and color, and using them, not as vehicles of natural representation, but as symbols, appealing freely, without concrete reference, to the imagination. To repeat, these pioneers of the new movement find themselves at the point where the Renaissance started in the thirteenth century. The latter broke away from the remnant of the Oriental ideal, left in Byzantine art, to conquer a new world of natural representation, and its evolution has been completed. The new movement has recovered the Oriental standpoint from which to attempt the conquest of a new ideal. It is a movement, at present, mainly of experiment, and necessarily so. For all of us, whether artists or laymen, are as yet too much under the influence of centuries of inherited tradition to be able to free ourselves from the consciousness of what it stands for.

The artist of our own time whose intuition steered him first in the direction of this new conception and use of form and color is Whistler; and among the potent influences of his own life was Rembrandt. That the latter was habitually desirous of evading the concrete significance of form is contradicted by innumerable pictures; but that in some he did evade it, even as Whistler did in his Nocturnes, is undeniable. Moreover, Rembrandt showed less regard for the traditional use of form and color than any artist up to our own day. With all his sense of its significance, he used it with the complete freedom of personal expression; and so enveloped it in the half-lights and obscurities of an atmosphere of his own invention, that, while the picture represents an incident, it contradicts the idea of material representation. It is, to a more abstract degree than has been reached by any other Caucasian artist, the record of a spiritual impression, based on the symbolic use of form and color. It approaches the brink of that still further detachment from the necessities of natural representation that characterizes the New Thought in modern art.

CHAPTER VI
THE INFLUENCE OF HALS AND REMBRANDT

BOTH Hals and Rembrandt, each in his different way, have influenced the art of modern times much in the same way in which they influenced their contemporaries. Hals was and still remains a great exemplar of technical method which may be practically adopted, while Rembrandt, with a technique that defies imitation, has influenced his own times and ours by inspiring principles not only of technique but of motive. The difference is inherent in their characters—Hals the raconteur; Rembrandt the thinker.

Hals, with his masterful gift of summarizing the incidents and accidents of an occasion or a personality, resembles the best examples of the modern journalist and magazine writer; keenly alive to the temper of his own time; reflecting everything vividly, as in a mirror, yet with a discrimination for effects. Rembrandt, on the other hand, so absorbed in his own contemplation as to be an enigma to the man who runs and reads, is yet so passionately human that the place he by degrees makes for himself in the imagination and the heart of those who learn to know him expands and deepens. The difference between them is epitomized in their respective kinds of technique. While Rembrandt is a constructor, Hals is a “follower of surfaces.”

THE SUPPER AT EMMAUS REMBRANDT

LOUVRE, PARIS

This may possibly explain the immediate and direct hold that Hals has exerted upon modern art. The latter has been mainly concerned with imitation, casting around for borrowed motives and for an appropriate method of expressing them. In portraiture especially it has been confronted with the problem of catering to the luxurious and extravagant superficialities of a society largely composed of nouveaux riches. For such the grave intellectuality of that other example of our day, Velasquez, was inappropriate, but Hals’s glib, effective following of surfaces, just the thing. It has authority and style, while its essential commonness of feeling is discreetly veiled by a veneer of aristocratic suggestion, and its evasion of the problems of construction is disguised beneath a handsome showing of virility. His, in fact, was precisely the style that met the demands and suited the temperament of society in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Many, I suppose, will repudiate the notion that Hals was either commonplace or faulty as a constructor of form. He is so much a man of our own time, and in consequence has been so belauded, that to some it may sound like lèse-majesté to dispute his position in modern estimation. On the other hand, if one tries to get beyond the barrier of approbation with which artists and the public have blocked the free view of Hals in relation to other portrait-painters of his own school, such as Rembrandt or Terborch, or of other schools or periods, the suspicion of his comparative commonness of feeling may grow into a conviction. Whether it does so or not is so purely a question of individual point of view and feeling that it would be futile to try to reason the matter out. I can scarcely explain my own conviction. Perhaps I have hinted at the basis of it in applying to Hals the term a raconteur, and in likening his style to that of a brilliant newspaper man. It is the function of both of these latter to make an immediate appeal, not necessarily flashy but certainly striking, to a mixed gathering of listeners or readers, whose first and sole demand is that the gist of the matter shall be hit off attractively. Each in a greater or less degree is addressing a crowd, and, since the latter’s aggregate of mentality and feeling is of a lower order than the mentality and taste of some, at least, of the individuals composing it, the speaker or writer, to prove attractive, must, consciously or unconsciously, adjust his thought and expression to this lower level. Such is the suggestion of Hals and his modern imitators, when their work is compared with that of the great portrait-painters, whose feeling and style are the products of their own high-bred aloofness and self-sustained individuality. The work of the former, by comparison, seems designed to attract, as directly as possible and in a way to make the least demand upon reflection. It skims the surfaces and summarizes the most obvious of their features in the raciest of ways.

On the other hand, it is easier to transmit the conviction that Hals was a follower of surfaces, for one’s eyesight here assists one’s feeling. Look at one of his portraits and observe the fluent skill with which the several planes of the features are rendered; the finesse with which a glove is fitted to the hand, the folds of a costume are expressed, and even protuberances of the form suggested. It is admirable, marvelous! When painters can achieve such magic, it is no wonder that we have a phrase, “as clever as paint.” But compare this portrait with one of Rembrandt’s, and the latter’s superiority in the matter of solidity and structural strength becomes apparent. The suggestion of form in Hals’s is altogether slighter; you will not be convinced of bone and muscle structure beneath the surfaces, and, if you continue the comparison from gallery to gallery or choose to vary it by comparing Hals with Van Eyck, Dürer, Holbein, and the great portrait-painters of the other schools, will hardly fail to be convinced of his inferiority as a constructor.

On the other hand, it was his skill in following the surface that made his influence so valuable to his contemporaries. The sense of structural form cannot be imparted. It is constitutional; a man has it or he has not. But it is possible to teach efficiency in brushwork; and Hals, one of the most brilliant painters who ever lived, set a standard of painter-like craftsmanship that, passed on by his immediate pupils to others, gave to Holland the merit of producing the most efficient school of painters in the world. The most important of his pupils were Terborch, Metsu, Wouwerman, and Adriaen van Ostade, the last named the teacher of Jan Steen. It is a noticeable fact that all these men were genre painters, for even Wouwerman, by a slight straining of the word, can be included, since the individual charm of his landscapes consists in their animated groups of figures, and it was in his treatment of these that he was especially indebted to Hals. In fact, the latter’s influence on the men of his own day was directly and most characteristically and emphatically shown, not, as in our day, in portraiture, but in genre; in shaping, refining, and giving new distinction to the tendency for genre pictures that the Hollanders had inherited from the united School of Flanders.

In a previous chapter we have spoken of the encouragement which Hals’s example gave to the still-life painting; it was no less effective in encouraging the use of still-life in genre. The motive of the new genre became less that of depicting an incident than of picturing the environment of home life, its accompaniments of furniture and belongings; and these were made contributory to recreating the spirit of the life.

Immediately from this proceeds the second point which the genre painters gained from Hals: namely, an inspiration for the composition of their pictures. It is marked no less by naturalness than propriety, and by an extraordinary feeling of unity. There is an excellent discretion alike in the choice and in the arrangement of details; everything is characteristic and made subservient to the general harmony.

The latter results from the third point enforced by Hals’s example: the principle of relativity in the use of values. Color became the basis of the new genre, and color treated from the point of view of tone; hence again the incomparable unity of impression which examples of the best genre artists exhibit. Some mass of local color, either cool or warm in hue, affords a dominant note. To this, by means of contrasts and repetitions, the whole scheme is tuned. The contrasting values of other local colors are opposed to that of the dominant mass, and higher and lower values of all these colors repeated throughout the scheme. The harmony that ensues may be rich and low or high in key and sprightly, but in the finest examples, and they are very numerous, is always characterized by a choice refinement.

This quality is due in no slight measure to the fourth way in which these artists were indebted to Hals, namely, their skill in brushwork. For they learned from him to lay the color on frankly and directly, without fumbling or indecision. They constructed their forms in color, building them up with layers of modulated values, working generally with a small brush, but one that was fully charged with pigment which was floated on to the surface. Thus the color has not only body and substance, but also a limpid transparency, a quality as of liquidized gems. It is this blend of lightness of touch, of purity of pigment, and withal of solid underpainting, that gives breadth and dignity to the delicacy of these harmonies. To assure one’s self of this it is but necessary to compare a Vermeer or Terborch with a Netscher. The last is felt at once to have less breadth and dignity, and altogether slighter charm; and an examination of his technique helps to explain the reason. There is less underpainting, and in the minute and dainty passages the pigment has not been floated but stippled over the surface. The result is a comparative tightness of feeling and, in place of limpid transparency, a suggestion rather of thinness and hardness.

The influence exerted by Hals in these four directions—namely, in the treatment of still-life, in composition, in regard for values, and in the habit of skilful brushwork—was supplemented by that of Rembrandt, which dates from 1632, the year in which he moved to Amsterdam. The latter also affected the development of genre, but not in the line of direct suggestion. Rembrandt’s technique in its most characteristic aspects was and still remains too personal an expression of his own attitude of mind and of its changes of mood, varying according to the nature of each subject interpreted, to permit of imitation. Rembrandt contributed ideas. He enlarged the scope of genre by the suggestion, on the one hand, of a further range of subject, and, on the other, of a new motive in technique. It was especially the example of his religious pictures that affected the idea of subject, either directly leading other artists to a similar treatment of religious themes or indirectly encouraging them to include some kind of sentiment in the domestic scenes they depicted. Meanwhile, by the example of his own use of chiaroscuro, he encouraged a more subtle study of values, at once more intimate and varied and more expressive.

An admirable epitome of the character of Rembrandt’s influence upon his contemporaries is in the old Pinakothek in Munich. In the first place there is a Holy Family, painted in 1631, the year before he moved from Leyden. It is about six feet high, the figures being life-size; but the conception and treatment of the subject are thoroughly in the way of genre. The picture presents a glimpse of the interior of a Dutch home: the tools hanging on the walls, the face, figure, and costume of the mother, the Child swathed in a shawl, and the familiar accompaniment of the cradle—all are distinctively Dutch in character. The mother, with a pretty gesture of tenderness, is fondling one of the Baby’s feet, looking down at it with a gentle smile, while the father bends forward over the cradle in an attitude of reverent solicitude. The whole scene breathes the quiet happiness of domestic life. In its character the picture is essentially a genre subject. At the time it was painted Dou was working in Rembrandt’s studio, and to its influence it is not unreasonable to trace at least some of the tendency that Dou exhibited in later years to introduce just such tender and reverential sentiment into his own work, as witness The Young Mother at the Hague Gallery and The Old Woman Saying Grace in the Pinakothek in Munich. In fact, The Holy Family is already characteristic of the sentiment that became infused into genre by the example of Rembrandt.

Intimately connected with this is the example of Rembrandt’s technical use of chiaroscuro, used either for the purpose of interpreting sentiment or of simply adding to the interest of the color-scheme. The foretaste of this is given in a series of six pictures of Biblical subjects in the Pinakothek, painted for the Stadtholder, Frederick Henry: two of them, The Descent from the Cross and The Elevation of the Cross, in 1633; The Ascension, 1636; The Burial and The Resurrection, 1639; and The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1646. About three feet high, they approximate to the familiar size of genre, and are distinctly genre in conception and treatment. Moreover, they are arched over at the top, a device that became popular with Dou and other genre painters, who frequently substituted for the formal arch a draped curtain, the result being to set the main part of the scene back, and thus increase the effect of looking into it. This, however, is not merely to suggest more vividly the third dimension. For Rembrandt in these pictures has set the example of concentrating the high light on a few features of the composition, surrounding these with lighted objects of lower value, and finally inclosing all in a ring of shadow, so that one seems to be looking into a circular concavity out of the gloom of which certain objects emerge into view with greater or less distinctness. The device is used by Rembrandt to heighten the dramatic and emotional significance of the composition, and was so applied by some of his followers, notably by Maes, while by others the principle was adopted as a means of giving force, variety, and added charm of mystery to their color-schemes. It became, in fact, one of the most characteristic of the technical methods of Holland genre.

Apropos of this series it is interesting to note, as a side-light on Rembrandt’s use of models, that one, The Elevation of the Cross, contains a striking figure of an Oriental. It was transferred in reduced size from a picture of the same subject painted in the preceding year, 1632, which is now owned by the New York collector Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt. Moreover, the head and bust of this man appear as the subject of another picture, painted in the same year as The Elevation, which now hangs in the Munich Pinakothek.

To recapitulate, then, in this series of the Old Pinakothek we have a striking example of Rembrandt’s motive in the treatment of Biblical subjects, developed during the period from 1633 to 1646 of his greatest popularity in Amsterdam. It involved, as we have seen, the translation of the heroic and grandiloquent style of religious subjects, as practised by the Italians, into the homelier poignancy and intimate personal suggestiveness of meaning that commended themselves to the simple directness and home-love of the Hollanders. It practically converted the religious picture into one of genre; and its example led to a similar treatment of these subjects by other painters, notably Carel Fabritius, Govert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, and Gerbrandt van den Eeckhout, while to the painters of domestic genre pure and simple it also supplied the motive of sentiment and a new motive of technique.

It is true that sentiment plays a comparatively small part in Holland genre. Dou has been mentioned as following the example of Rembrandt in this respect, and the other prominent instance is Nicolaes Maes, who entered the master’s studio in 1648, that is to say, two years after the completion of The Adoration of the Shepherds, the latest of the Munich series. How far Rembrandt had influenced the bias of Maes’s temperament toward sentiment is conjectural, but that he supplied the younger man with a technical principle for its expression is certain. Maes discovered the possibilities of emotional suggestion that existed in the device of heightening the luster of certain parts of the composition by the contrast of veiled and shadowed color elsewhere. With him it does not reach the dramatic force or depth of emotional appeal that the master’s use of it involves, but nevertheless becomes the expression of a sentiment that, as Bode remarks, is nearer to the sentiment of Rembrandt than that of any other artist of the school.

On the other hand, by those genre artists of the period who were not given to sentiment, the principle of Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro was adopted for the sake of æsthetic considerations, founded upon the facts of sight. It may or may not be true that Rembrandt himself derived it from his observation of the light in the dim recesses of his father’s mill, but at any rate the artists of genre interiors soon saw its application to their subjects, and were led by it to study with more discrimination the infinite variety of light value. The result was twofold. Their color-schemes grow more subtle and refined, and the tonality becomes impregnated with the suggestion of atmosphere. Thus the example of Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro wedded to that of Hals’s facile craftsmanship developed the inimitable perfection of technique which characterizes the best works of Holland genre.

It is the latter, one may observe in conclusion, that has most affected the modern revival of painting in Holland. While foreign painters, in portraiture especially, have been disposed to follow the direct example of Frans Hals, the Hollanders themselves, both in landscape and genre, have been influenced by the so-called “little masters,” and, in the case of Josef Israels, by Rembrandt himself. And the result of this influence has been to make modern Dutch painters, as a group, the best brushmen of their age.

CHAPTER VII
DUTCH GENRE

THE tendency toward genre painting began before the separation of the Holland Free State from the Spanish Netherlands. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, who died in Brussels in 1570, is regarded as the leader of the group of painters who depicted the life of the people, particularly in open-air surroundings. His work, for example, and that of one of his pupils, Lucas van Valckenborch, make a very lively showing in one of the galleries of the Art-History Museum in Vienna. Here, in a number of canvases of considerable size, crowded with figures, are pictured scenes of peasants, merrymaking, harvesting, engaged in a vintage festival, or skating and sleighing, while there is even a representation of rich folk enjoying a picnic in a park. These painters and their contemporaries in similar subjects are to be reckoned in the Flemish School. But there is one, Pieter Aertz, surnamed “Long Pieter,” who, although he died in 1575, before any separation from Flanders was dreamed of, may be considered as a forerunner of distinctly Dutch genre, since he was born in Amsterdam and lived there for the greater part of his life. An interesting example of his work, The Egg Dance, is in the Rijks Museum. The scene is a kitchen, opening into a garden, and the floor is scattered with various articles—a bowl, a shoe, onions and eggs—among which a young man is jauntily dancing, while a group beside the hearth applauds. As far as the character and spirit of the scene go, the picture is thoroughly representative of the older kind of genre, which portrays the type rather than the individual, and numerous little episodes massed into a group, rather than a single incident or phase of life wrought out completely. For this becomes the tendency of the later and distinctively Holland genre, which, as the technical motives of the artists grew in refinement and possibly as the taste of the public became more refined, resulted in the subjects being drawn more and more from the home life of the well-to-do and fashionable. By this time the genre pictures have ceased to represent an amusing picture-book of manners and customs; they have in a sense lost their interest of subject, the matter of which they treat counting for very little in comparison with the charming manner of the treatment.

The three greatest masters of Holland genre, Vermeer, Terborch, and Jan Steen, must be considered separately. Meanwhile we will summarize the method and manner of some of the most important among the able but lesser artists.

ADRIAEN VAN OSTADE

Van Ostade, who was a pupil of Hals and later became influenced by Rembrandt, stands midway between the earlier and the later motives of genre. His favorite and, on the whole, most characteristic subjects are groups of peasants reveling or squabbling in the kitchens or around the doors of inns. The figures are squat and lumpish, curiously like animated roly-poly puddings, only redeemed from commonness by the limpid coloring and the suave, facile manner of the brushwork that he had derived from Hals. Sometimes, however, he selects a few figures and gives them an individual characterization. In fact, the latter pictures, as well as his groups of peasants, show a remarkable affinity to Brouwer’s treatment of similar subjects. For this eccentric and original artist, an “Adonis in rags,” as he has been called, a refined painter of coarse themes, though Flemish by birth, seems to have come under the influence of Frans Hals, lived in Haarlem and Amsterdam, and was really in his art representative of the Holland School of genre. Van Ostade, therefore, must have known him and may well have been affected by his example. At any rate, the character and spirit of his earlier pictures correspond with those of Brouwer’s, though the latter’s work exhibits a more refined artistic sense. In time, however, Van Ostade came under the Rembrandtesque manner; the thinness of his painting develops into a richer impasto, the feeling of the composition becomes larger, the choice of subject more distinguished, and his treatment more studied and sympathetic, while the tone is warmer and more luminous in consequence of the shrewder use of chiaroscuro. Later his manner again changes to one of extreme refinement, almost finical. The surface, to use an expressive French word, léché, seems licked into glossiness; the tone has become cold and grayish; the compositions are more studied but less picturesque; yet the colors have an extraordinary transparency. The whole canvas has less the air of intimate observation than of something wrought over in the studio.

These three phases of Van Ostade’s development can be studied side by side in the examples of his work in the Gallery of The Hague. Representative of his first manner is Peasants’ Holiday, painted in 163-(the last figure is undecipherable); of the second, Marriage Proposal, which belongs to the period between 1650 and 1655; and of the third manner, Peasants in an Inn and The Fiddler, painted respectively in 1662 and 1673.

Van Ostade died in Haarlem in 1685. Among his pupils were his brother Isaac van Ostade (1621-1649), Cornelis Bega (1620-1664), and Cornelis Dusart (1660-1704). The last named inherited a great number of his master’s studies and sketches, which he worked upon and finished. These after Dusart’s death were sold as his own, a fact which helps to explain the similarity of his style to that of Adriaen van Ostade. Bega often imitated the latter’s choice of subject, and also with some success his manner of gray tonality, but his colors lack transparency, and the flesh parts are dry and brickish. The outdoor scenes of Isaac van Ostade, alive with figures in characteristic action, are exceedingly interesting as pictures of the “passing show” of Dutch life. Lastly, it is to the credit of Adriaen van Ostade that he was the teacher of, or at least exercised considerable influence over, Jan Steen during the latter’s sojourn in Haarlem. But the manner of his own pictures is that of the earlier genre which preceded the great School of Holland.

PEASANTS ROUND A HEARTH ADRIAEN VAN OSTADE

RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM

GERARD (GERRIT) DOU

This artist, born in Leyden, 1613, and dying there in 1675, spent his whole life in his native city, helped to found its Guild of St. Luke, and influenced several other genre painters. Among the latter were Gabriel Metsu, Godfried Schalcken, Pieter Cornelisz van Slingeland, and Frans van Mieris the Elder, who handed on the tradition of the Leyden School to his son, Willem van Mieris. Dou himself had enjoyed the influence of Rembrandt, in whose studio he worked during the three years preceding the master’s move to Amsterdam in 1631. But before this time he had been instructed by his father, who was a painter on glass, and by Bartholomeus Dolando, an engraver. Dou’s own matured style very remarkably reflects both the earlier and the later experiences of his training. While he learned to feel his subject in the manner of Rembrandt, he contrived also to see it with a precise eye for detail and to render it with the nicety of a painter on glass or of one who uses the burin. He was an impeccable draftsman and a good composer, so long as the subject contained only a few figures and was treated in a small size. For large canvases and the handling of a complicated composition his style was altogether too minute in character. On the other hand, his color is always harmonious, though in some works inclined to an excessive polish; and the chiaroscuro, skilfully applied, is, when the subject permits, very charmingly expressive of the sentiment. He devoted himself to the representation of interiors and, as we have seen, adopted the device of showing them through an arch or beyond a lambrequin, formed of a heavily draped curtain, frequently also representing one or more figures at a window with the obscurity of the room behind them. In thus adapting Rembrandt’s principle of chiaroscuro to the rendering of the physical phenomenon of a concave space more or less immersed in shadow, no one was more skilful than Dou. To give depth and quality to the obscurity of the distance and especially of the ceiling, he would hang a chandelier or lantern in the middle distance and catch the light upon it. Similarly, he would place some objects in the foreground to bring the latter forward, and then between these two foci of secondary light concentrate or scatter the main group of figures in highest illumination.

The two finest examples of his skill in thus building up a composition of values of light are The Young Mother, in the gallery of The Hague, and The Dropsical Woman of the Louvre. The former, because of its charming sentiment, is Dou’s most popular picture; but the other, in consequence of the superior simplicity and concentration of its composition, the comparative breadth of its treatment and fuller richness of color and quality of chiaroscuro, is without much doubt his masterpiece. However, another example which approaches it very closely is A Lady at her Toilet, in the Munich Gallery. Dou’s interest in chiaroscuro led him to experiment with so-called night-pieces, where the gloom of the interior is illuminated by a candle that makes a central spot of brilliance, fitfully reflected in a partially diffused glow. Such are An Old Woman who has Lost her Thread and the Young Man and Girl in a Cellar, both in the Dresden Gallery; while the most elaborate and famous example is The Night School of the Rijks Museum, somewhat damaged by time, in which there are five separate points of varying degrees of illumination.

In a picture in the Dresden Gallery Dou has represented himself at work in his studio, a bare and homely room, lighted by a large window on the left. This window, with slight differences of shape and size, appears in many of his works, occupying a similar position; while, even when it is not shown, its effect is noticeable in the artist’s tendency to light his compositions from the left. Another instance of his tendency to repetition of motive may be traced in the frequency with which he used over and over again the same piece of furniture or object of furnishing. For example, in a still-life (No. 1708) in the Dresden Gallery appears the same candle-stick that is introduced in a number of other pictures. The point is interesting as showing the way in which Dou artificially arranged his subject-matter; and he was followed in this respect as in others by all the genre painters. Each had his particular motive of composition and freely repeated it; his particular bit of costume or article of furnishing that with variations of arrangement he used repeatedly. Holland genre, in fact, ceased almost from its beginning to be a direct representation of actual domestic life. It was based upon the latter, but the artist reserved a complete liberty of selection and arrangement. He was not intent upon illustrating the life, and only borrowed hints from it to assist him in creating a picture of his own invention. It is a point to be observed by the modern public, which is apt to resent, as shallow in motive and uninteresting in subject, a picture which has been designed mainly or solely as a picture; that is to say, for the beauty of form, color, light, and tone that may be expressed in a composition of objects, arbitrarily brought together for this purpose. Such an attitude on the part of an artist is, however, thoroughly justified by the example of the Holland School of genre, which it is the fashion to-day to admire so generously.

NICOLAES MAES

Some may criticize this placing of Maes among the lesser artists of genre. Bode ranks him with Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch among the “great genre painters of Holland,” and adds that “there is scarcely any pupil of Rembrandt’s who approaches the great master so nearly as Maes does in this series of pictures.” He is alluding to Dreaming, or, as it is sometimes called, A Reverie, a young girl gazing out of a window, and to Asking a Blessing, in the Rijks Museum; to The Young Card-Players, in the National Gallery, and to Nurse and Children with Goat-Carriage, in a private collection; and also to certain pictures of old women, such as the one owned by Mr. John G. Johnson of Philadelphia, that was recently seen in the Exhibition of Dutch Art in the Metropolitan Museum. In all of these pictures the figures are life-size, and, to quote Bode, “one weakness is common to all of them: that they present simple motives on a large canvas with rough execution and without the powerful

OLD WOMAN SPINNING NICOLAES MAES

RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM

and individual language with which Rembrandt renders similar genre pieces.”

The truth of this criticism seems to be sufficient of itself to exclude Maes from the ranks of the great genre painters, whose works are great of their kind just because these painters so admirably fitted the size of their pictures to the scope of their intention and their powers, and wrought their canvases to the highest pitch of a personally inspired technical perfection. This became the ideal of Holland genre and remains its chief distinction; and Maes only attains to it in his smaller canvases, such as the two examples of An Old Woman Spinning, in the Rijks Museum, and An Old Woman Peeling Apples (the spinning-wheel near her), in the Berlin Gallery, and The Cradle and The Dutch Housewife of the National Gallery. The period of these small genre pictures, beginning about 1655 and lasting for ten years, represents the high-water mark of Maes’s artistic career.

In his earlier period he shows a preference for red, juxtaposed with black and less frequently with yellow, that continues to characterize his work. But at first, as in The Dreamer, it is the brightness of hue that seems to attract him. He has bathed the red shutter and the girl’s figure and the leaves and fruit of the apricot-tree, that grows beside the window from which she leans, in a warm sunlight, and the latter, blended with soft shadows, glows upon her face and hands. All the several textures are rendered with admirable veracity, and a resemblance to life, that would be startling but for the quiet, pensive expression of the girl’s figure that pervades the canvas. The picture attracts and charms, but does it hold one’s interest? Scarcely, if you come back to it after seeing the more imaginative treatment of chiaroscuro in the Card-Players of the National Gallery; and still less, if you compare it with one of Maes’s smaller genre pictures in the Rijks Museum; for example, An Old Woman Spinning (No. 1504). Here the red reappears in the table-cloth, and the black spot is made by her head against the drabbish white of the wall, but the yellow is disguised in her olive-green dress, which shows the whitish-gray sleeves of the undergarment. It is a cooler scheme of color, more restrained yet richer, and it is lighted without any striking contrasts of chiaroscuro. Instead, the humble apartment is permeated with a dimly luminous atmosphere, out of which certain parts of the composition emerge into clearness, while the rest is veiled in half-tones and shadow. The picture is extraordinarily real, exquisite in technique, and deeply moving in its suggestion of the half-lights of existence among the aged and the poor. The secret is, that what was experiment or assertion in the larger canvas has here become the free expression of the artist’s simple and sincere sentiment. Sentiment and expression are united in a natural and complete equipoise.

During the last twenty-five years of his life Maes seems to have gained a rather scanty subsistence by painting portraits. Some of these are of high merit; the Portrait of a Man, for example, in the Fine Arts Museum at Budapest, which represents a gray-haired and bearded man, with black velvet cap and black coat edged with brown fur, sitting in a red-backed chair. Thus it repeats the artist’s favorite color-scheme, and moreover,

OLD WOMAN IN MEDITATION GABRIEL METSU

RIJKS MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM